SUN YU AND THE EARLY AMERICANIZATION OF CHINESE CINEMA

Part 3

american Dreams/american nightmares

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CHAPTER 8

SUN YU AND THE EARLY AMERICANIZATION

OF CHINESE CINEMA-------------------------------

CORRADO NERI

one of the most frequent remarks made in discussions of contempo-rary Chinese cinema is that it is “Americanized”, or “Hollywood-like”. This usually implies a slight disdain for Hollywood cinema, or an over-evaluation of the supposed “originality” of Chinese cinema. Commenta-tors tend to think that this “Americanization” is, at best, an imitation of Western models as regards narrative, structure, and aesthetics, and, at worst, a betrayal of China’s most authentic “traditional” values. Of course, what is actually meant by “American” or “Hollywood” is highly debatable. For the most part, these critics are implying that recent Chinese film is commercial (which is also a highly debatable term), genre-oriented, formulaic, opulent and ostentatious, predictable, market-oriented, and a vehicle for the star system – not to mention other characteristics of the film industry that cinema historians have been describing and debat-ing since the very beginning of cinema studies. One example is the rele-vance of orchestral music and its profound effects on reception, emotion-al impact, and ideology.

In his encyclopedic history of Japanese cinema, Tadao Sato argues that the western-style orchestral music was a characteristic of all successful movies of the silent era in Japan, when the orchestra played live in front of the screen.1 At the same time, traditional Japanese music was considered to

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be vulgar, and survived only in popular festivities. This was also true in China2, where piano and violins gradually gained more popularity than traditional music on the burgeoning middle class’s entertainment scale. Formulaic rhetorical music devices still find their place in most contem-porary Chinese and Japanese productions – the yearning piano solo that accompanies a parting couple, forceful violins that signal heightening emo-tion, and so forth. The Hollywood model (in both its mass appeal and its industrial organization) surely continues to seduce contemporary film producers and audiences in China.

Yet, it is important to remember that this is nothing new. Cinema was imported to the “Orient” as a foreign good, both as a technique and as an art, a science, as well as a window on the uncanny “West.” It is amply doc-umented that in China (and in the Far East in general), the public was ea-ger to see western movies, particularly Hollywood films, in the first few decades of the 20th century. Citing an American study published in 1938, Laikwan Pang reports that in 1936 “among all films shown in China, only 12 percent of them were local productions, yet American films comprised more than 80 percent, and Soviet movies represented a mere 2.4 percent”.3 Popular taste was enthusiastic about and modeled by Hollywood produc-tion, often claiming disdain for local creations, dismissing them as vulgar, technically inferior, and less daring. When sympathetic with the Maoist revolution, later scholars harshly criticized the dominance of Hollywood movies and their supposed brainwashing effects on the public. Regis Bergeron, for example, condemns all American films available in China, claiming that they serve as a means to colonize the imagination of the Chinese people and to divert the revolutionary production into light en-tertainment. Bergeron notes, not without disdain, that China had not only produced its own versions of Laurel and Hardy, but also versions of Char-lie Chaplin – as regards the latter, arguably without the disruptive energy and the harsh critique of the status quo typical of Chaplin.4

If on the one hand, popular taste tended to indulge in treacherous Occidentalism,5 on the other hand, filmmakers were more ambivalent. During the 1920’s and 30’s, the Soviet model was popular among intel-lectuals in China owing to translations of Soviet theories, the screening of movies directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov, and a much celebrated séance introducing the Battleship Potemkin in 1926 (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925); note that this screening was not public, but limited to a select list of cinematographers and intellectuals. While the impact of

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the Battleship Potemkin’s visual force was arguably remarkable on a few politically committed artist and journalists, the practice of Eisenstein-like montage was nevertheless seldom utilized in a context where, in the first place, left-wing parties were repressed and censored and, secondly, cinema had to depend heavily on public recognition in order to survive. Laikwan Pang has written about the contrasts between Hollywood and Soviet models in pre-1949 Chinese cinema:

The real impact of Soviet Cinema to the Chinese one was restricted to a

symbolic level. In fact, Chinese spectators at the time only watched a

handful of Soviet productions, far fewer then the Hollywood films. So-

viet films were not allowed to be shown in China in the 1920s because the

Chinese government refused to acknowledge the Bolshevik revolution

and the legitimacy of the new socialist state.[…] While Chinese specta-

tors most of the time favor those stories full of antagonist struggles on

the semantic level of plot, they enjoy continuity and clarity on the syntac-

tic level. If […] ‘conflict’ structured many Chinese films beginning in the

1930s, this notion of conflict was definitely more ‘melodramatic’ than

‘montage’, refers more to the content than to the form. That is to say,

Chinese films in the 1930s were highly aware of using conflicts, which cor-

respond, however, more to the emotional confrontation within the story

than to the Soviet montage designed for intellectual enlightenment.6

Chinese (or maybe Shanghainese) cinema was struggling at the time between commercial and political models. These categories, even if im-precise and overlapping, were discussed at that time by theoreticians, filmmakers, critics, journalists, audiences, and writers. By analyzing ar-ticles published in the newspapers and magazines, and more intellectual studies on the (relatively) new art form, it is evident that national cinema was trying to emulate Hollywood dominance in this field. Widespread dislike of national cinema was taken for granted—the most immediate example that comes to mind is Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881–1936), considered to be the father of modern Chinese literature. Being a writer who was ex-tremely concerned about the nation’s future, one would expect that he would have endorsed local production. Yet, we discover from his diaries that he almost exclusively watched and enjoyed American movies.7

Although national cinema (a slippery term, within the context of a rapidly changing political situation like the Chinese one at the beginning

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of the 19th century) was not being ignored, it was sometimes difficult to differentiate between the “local” and the westernized cinematographic models; cinematographers, script writers and critics periodically argued over the necessity to endorse and sustain their national cinema in the face of the colonial cultural dominance of the western model. However, this was much more closely related to production values and content ethics than it was to form or style. Producers and investors had to survive with-out state subsidies (unlike post-revolution Russia); many of them found it more lucrative to speculate on fluctuations of the market, by buying and selling equipment (including the very film itself) and studio proprieties, rather than invest in the high-risk enterprise of movie pictures.

On the other hand, in the eyes of progressive filmmakers, the ultimate goal was the engagement of all citizens, a coming to consciousness that would ultimately lead to radical changes in society and politics. Thus the most “Chinese/traditional” productions (those related to popular enter-tainment like the wuxiapian/martial movies and the opera film) were loved by the public, but rejected by the intelligentsia and pioneer film-makers as a suspicious – if not despicable – remainder from feudal times. Yet even the more leftist productions, later acclaimed by official histori-ography as the seeds of the new revolutionary consciousness in cinema, needed public recognition, box office response, as well as a safe way through censorship’s control. The most practiced way to reach public ac-claim and to spread modernist and democratic values was through melo-drama. As a “new” genre, indebted to western romantic and popular lit-erature, Ibsen’s theater, Beethoven’s symphonies and of course, Holly-wood “Griffithiana”, melodramatic cinema was – in the late twenties and thirties – already a largely global language. Many critics had argued that melodrama was one or the principal characteristic of Chinese cinema in general.8 Others tried to redefine this idea using different concepts, such as the concept of the “vernacular.” Zhang Zhen writes:

In grafting cinema studies onto the social and experiential body of a mod-

ernizing vernacular culture in China, my primary concerns lie with the

parallel and intertwining vernacular movement and Shanghai cinema.

The latter manifests itself as a complex ramification of, contribution to,

and intervention into the former. The vernacular here is configured as a

cultural (linguistic, visual, sensory, and material) ‘processor’ that blends

foreign and local, premodern and modern, high and low, cinematic and

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other cultural ingredients to create a domestic product with cosmopoli-

tan appeal. This processor—a worldly technology, a translation machine,

and a cultural sensorium—allowed for different levels of mediation and

forms of synthesis. It continually catered to and changed the local audi-

ences’ tastes, shaping and reshaping their worldviews. The cinema sub-

stantially fashioned China into something of a modern democratic soci-

ety, and as such it imagined and configured new perceptions of the body,

gender, and sexuality. These changes were exemplified by the first gener-

ation of screen actors and actresses and the cinematic renderings of the

marginal heroine, the dandy, the revolutionary and the Modern Girl.9

What I intend to present here is a preliminary analysis on how part of the codes of Hollywood narrative cinema arrived in China and how these codes were developed to suit local standards. One of the most prominent movie makers of the golden age of Chinese cinema consciously and ad-mittedly introduced Hollywood techniques, styles and aesthetics in na-tional cinema, via a lyrical yet realistic, popular yet informed, consistent yet variegated cinematographic style. I am referring here to the pioneer director Sun Yu 孫瑜 (1900–1990). Zhou Binde, a professor of film stud-ies at Fudan University in Shanghai, argues:

From a Chinese point of view, cinema is an ‘imported item.’ Traditional

Chinese culture and cinema have no blood ties. During its one hundred

years’ history, Chinese cinema has always been swayed by European and

American cinematographic traditions. We may argue that in China, cin-

ema is the art form that has most prominently received European and

American influx. […] Among the various influences that have shaped

Chinese cinema, the most profound and far-reaching comes from Holly-

wood. […] Even if later few directors and scriptwriters were to receive a

professional training like that of Hong Shen and Sun Yu, they did study

playwriting and directing in the States. Therefore, for the most part, their

theoretical knowledge and practical experience came from American cul-

ture, and their creative works could not completely free themselves of the

unobtrusive influence of Hollywood. For example, in 1930 Sun Yu wrote

and directed Wild Flowers for the Lianhua studio company. The film was

inspired by the American film Seventh Heaven. Therefore, looking at the

totality of Chinese cinema, we can argue that since 1920 very few movies

have dealt with social problems, or reflected any progressive ideology.

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However, many of them did convey a commercial awareness and an en-

tertaining aspect because they had learned the lessons taught by the ex-

perience of the Hollywood industry. They were deeply ‘Americanized.’10

I shall try to demonstrate by means of a textual analysis how Sun Yu con-tributed substantially to the globalization of this language—or “Ameri-canization”—if we consider Hollywood a synonym for “American,” and the Hollywood mode of production, a transcultural endeavor based on a collage of expertise, as well as a vertical, assembly-line production pro-cess. I argue that this director was to have a seminal influence, albeit sub-terranean and undeclared, on Chinese cinema to come. The main feature introduced by Sun Yu in Chinese cinema consists of a technical quality that I can only describe as “realism”, vague as this may seem: a specific form of realism: poetic, ideological, revolutionary and romantic, or per-haps even “critical realism”, marked by a special “fluidity.”11

How many adjectives to define Sun’s peculiar “realism”! I am very well aware that there is no one “realism.” Every culture, epoch, historical moment has its own notion of realism, as David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson demonstrate:

Notions of realism vary across cultures, through time, and even among

individuals. […] Moreover, realism has become one of the most prob-

lematic issues in the philosophy of art […] It is better, then, to examine

the functions of mise-en-scene than to dismiss this or that element that

happens not to match our conception of realism.12

As an ideal reply, we may recall here the words of Laikwan Pang: “I insist that there was a specific realist approach, although the critics/filmmakers failed to define it themselves, that was adopted and evolved in this cinema [early Chinese production, during the twenties and thirties], most signifi-cantly marking the uniqueness and achievement of this cinema in aesthet-ic terms.”13 The uniqueness of this realism is described as follows: “This cinema often risks reason to celebrate and exploit emotions. While the classical Hollywood cinema ‘created’ realism by supplying causal motiva-tion that addresses the viewer’s psychology, this Chinese left-wing cinema made its own by soliciting its spectators’ identification emotionally.”14

Sun Yu is a pioneer who helped Chinese cinema “fight” Western cine-ma on its own ground, helping it find a large audience and develop a

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personal, challenging, original language, as well as its own mode or in-terpretation of “realism”. As we have seen, the Hollywood influence on Chinese cinema was direct and well documented. I argue that this “influ-ence” (I call it an influence for lack of a better way to put it) could also be seen as extremely positive for the development of Chinese cinema. It helped this cinema to find its own blend, its own distinctive characteris-tic (the definition of which is not within the scope of this essay) in a transnational, transcultural cinema culture that is also a characteristic of Hollywood itself.15 At the same time, we have also mentioned a fighting spirit and the contradictions related to the perceived inferior position of China towards the “West”: Sun Yu, as most of his colleagues, was strug-gling to obtain a place for Chinese cinema (and Nation), a maturity that would encourage audiences to watch local productions and engage in lo-cal struggles to empower the masses—or at the very least, its illuminated representatives. He writes:

When I was in Wisconsin, I often watched movies. But at that time, in

some American films, Chinese people were all target of twisted and dis-

qualifying misrepresentation, described as symbol of stupidity and treach-

erousness. To us, Chinese foreign students, this was the most difficult

thing to accept. […] In school, American classmates, boys and girls alike,

were very intimate to me, sitting next to me and having pleasant discus-

sions. But on the street, when I met them, especially girls classmates, due

to racial discrimination, they did not find appropriate to greet me with

excessive sympathy, let alone walk with me.

我在威校讀書時也常看電影,但當時在一些美國電影裡,中國人都成了歪

曲醜化的對象和陰險愚蠢的象徵,這是留美的中國學生最感難受的事了.

[…] 在課堂里,美國男女同學和我親近雜坐交談,但在街上和他們相遇,特

別是女同學,由於種族歧視的偏見,就不便過分親近地打招呼,更難得結伴

同行了.

[Sun Yu, Dalu zhi ge 大路之歌 [Song of The Big Road], (Taibei, Yuanliu,

1990), 70–71]

Sun Yu was the only filmmaker at the time to complete his education in the States. After a period at Tsinghua University in Beijing (where he studied theatre and literature), in 1923 he began his literary studies at the

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University of Wisconsin, where he remained for three years, and later graduated from the New York Institute of Photography. He also took evening classes at Columbia University (where he specialized in photog-raphy and filmmaking). Sun Yu was there during the “Roaring Twen-ties”, when American cinema was crafting its global appeal. The influ-ence of a solid traditional Chinese literary education, American-style filmmaking and first-hand experience in the New York of the Jazz Age mingle in his works and writings.16 His most accomplished films include Wild Rose (Ye meigui 野玫瑰, 1932), Daybreak (Tianming 天明, 1933), Little Toys (Xiao wanyi 小玩藝, 1933), Queen of Sports (Tiyu huanghou 體育皇后, 1934), and The Big Road (Da lu 大路, 1935). Later, his famous and ac-claimed Life of Wu Xun (Wu Xun zhuan 武訓傳, 1949) had the misfortune of being one of first films to receive a direct and fierce critique from the People’s Daily, signed by Mao Zedong himself, and which almost put an end to his career. He still managed to produce a few movies in the late fifties, but they were pale works of propaganda, lacking any creative ten-sion. In his silent films, Sun Yu developed his own personal poetics, strongly influenced by his technical apprenticeship in the States and his practical experience as an avid moviegoer.

His was a vision, which, as the motto of the time was claiming, was able to use western techniques to express (embody) the Chinese soul. He became one of the most influential figures in Chinese cinema because de-spite what we may see as profoundly Americanized language, he managed to give voice to specific features and narratives of modern Chinese history. What Sun Yu brought back from New York was an idea of realism, a spe-cific cinematic form of (historically determined) realism obtained through camera work and his direction of actors. He remained very much attracted to his country’s social reality. He did not attempt to reproduce artificially the genre system—as others have before and after him, for example by creating a “Chinese horror movie,”17 or later, a Chinese musical inspired by a Broadway hit. Admittedly, Sun Yu was influenced by the works of King Vidor, F. W. Murnau, and D. W. Griffith, as he himself notes:

When I was attending Nankai High School I became a movie fan. I

watched many art films by the so-called ‘father of the screen,’ D.W.

Griffith, like for example the subversive Way Down East, starring the dra-

ma star Lilian Gish; or Broken Blossom, that tells the story of a tragic love

between a Western girl and a Chinese man; or The Three Musketeers, by Al-

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exandre Dumas Père. I recall The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, about the

tragedy of World War 1. When I was attending Qinghua University, I sub-

scribed by mail from the States the magazine Photoplay Writing which I

read attentively after class. Since I became a ‘movie fan,’ I did not engage

in the literary creation, as the comrade Mao Dun encouraged me to do.

我在南開中學讀書時早已迷上了電影,曾看了不少文藝性強的電影,如:號

稱”美國銀之父”葛里菲斯(D.W.Griffith)導演,悲劇影星麗蓮吉許(Lilian

Gish)主演, 有反對建內容的” 賴婚” (Way Down East),中英青年愛情悲

劇”殘花淚”(Broken Blossom),大仲嗎(Alexandre Dumas Pere)的"三劍

顆”(The three Musketeers). 還有歐戰悲劇”四騎士”(Four Horsmen of the

Apocalypse, 1921)等.在清華讀書時,我已從美國函購”電影編劇法”(Photo-

play Writing)一書在課餘時鐕研學習.由於我”迷”上了電影,因此沒有走

上矛盾同志鼓勵我從事文學創作的道路.

[Sun Yu, Dalu zhi ge 大路之歌 [Song of The Big Road], 62–63]

Besides the many evenings Sun Yu spent in cinema venues in the States, he and his colleagues also had a vast choice of Hollywood movies in Chi-na. Many sources (among which the previously cited scholarly works, as well as newspapers, novels, diaries and so on) acknowledge the release and popularity of comedies with Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and Buster Keaton. The movie experience was not limited to the actual screening, as it began well before and continued long after the actual showing via radio programs, advertisements, movie posters, and maga-zines, which all helped the public familiarize with the “western” way of life and the burgeoning star system. Regis Bergeron describes the culture shock induced by the public display of affection, particularly by the no-torious “kissing scenes” that reportedly shocked the Chinese public.18 Magazines and newspapers published enormous amounts of pictures re-lated to the movies themselves and to the pantheon of the star system; magazines studied the mise en scène, the script and the technique of the most successful films, and translated western reviews. For example, It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) and Crime and Punishment (Jo-seph von Sternberg, 1935) received wide coverage in the Chinese press.19

Seventh Heaven (Frank Borzage, 1927) was the direct inspiration for the classic Street Angel (Malu tianshi 馬路天使, Yuan Muzhi 袁牧之, 1937) in terms of style and especially plot. Seventh Heaven was also, as discussed above, the inspiration for a lost Sun Yu movie.

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The Chinese urban public was exposed to Hollywood culture. Yet, ar-guably because of the first-hand experience and formal education he re-ceived in the States, Sun Yu developed his own particular language and went on to become one of the most influential figures in Chinese cinema. Earlier I mentioned the idea of “realism” as a personal view of sculpting time, the human body and nature, a view that managed to be deeply Americanized, and yet intensely local. By “Americanized” I am referring to some narrative techniques. These techniques (which I will discuss fur-ther on) make his plots more character-driven, readable, and engaged in a narrative form that outdistances his cinema from the “traditional Chi-nese narrative that favors abundant details and branch developments.”20 Sun Yu’s idea of realism (I would say “poetic realism,” but this term is usually used to refer to another current in French film history) remains very much attached to his homeland, to the representation of China, to China’s struggle against imperialism, and to the exaltation of the beauty of the Chinese physique. What Sun Yu elaborates and develops is a spe-cific form, which, of course, brings content along. First, he re-creates the image of young people via an innovative use of camera work, shifting sensuously around actor’s body. The realism of Sun Yu is made of great sensuality—obtained by the absence of evident artificiality. This is a paradox of cinema (often, of art in general): com-plexity and elaboration seem “natural.” Sun Yu was one of the first direc-tors to avoid the “grotesque” rendering of emotion, shifting away from a well-established theatrical tradition—the most evident example of which is the diva Hu Die, 胡蝶 (a.k.a. Butterfly Hu), who was indeed charming, but very much indebted to theatrical codes. Sun Yu recruited his actors not from established classical theater groups, but from dance troupes made up of privileged and very young people. Such was the case of Wang Renmei 王人美 and Li Lili 黎莉莉 (a former dancer); but also Jin Yan 金焰, who, thanks to his roles in Sun Yu’s movies, became China’s leading ac-tor and was nicknamed “the Chinese Valentino.”21

The performance Sun Yu required from his actors was all about being spontaneous, showing inner strengths and avoiding theatrical clichés. His players are very sensual, often exposing their strong bodies and sweating faces. With a disregard for traditional modesty, the young stars present straightforward, self-assertive characters and physical presence. The images of Jin Yan and Li Lili in Sun Yu’s movies are dynamic, strong, and vital. These young people have nothing in common with the “Yellow

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Peril” stereotype of sickly, feeble-minded, submissive individuals. On the contrary, they are ideal vehicles of self-assertiveness, individual re-sponsibility, moral and physical strength, and political commitment. These characters are prepared to fight the traditional pillory, as well as western (and Japanese) imperialism. The new physical body represented by Sun Yu is not sculptural (motionless), but dancing, a healthy, athletic weapon. It is a human body that runs, swims, and suffers.

This representation is indebted to the process of the Americanization of Chinese cinema, and functional to a progressive discourse that aims to enlighten the masses with “new” conceptions of hygiene and health – the most obvious and celebrated example being Sun Yu’s Queen of Sport, where multiple sequences show the athletic physiques of young female students training for running and other sports or gymnastics. In one notable se-quence, the smiling face of Li Lili is shown as she brushes her teeth. This didactic suggestion is in keeping with the political pedagogic necessity to overcome the “sickness” of China as a nation, a weak entity under the rule of colonial and imperialist power. Mens sana in corpore sano used to be a Confucian principle, but it apparently had been long lost. A new focus on medicine, an obsession with hygiene was sweeping through China at the beginning of the 20th century,22 and some movie directors (above all, Sun Yu) endorsed this program, shifting away from theatrical conven-tions and delighting the public with images of young, healthy, semi-na-ked stars. Magazines were eager to publish pictures of sports queens, movie stars wearing sexy swim suits and posing in diving positions.23 Of course, with the political program of empowerment of the national body, there was also a sexual interest in the re-discovery of the nude body.

Figure 1: Li Lili in Daybreak.

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Directing techniques were one of the significant novelties introduced by Sun Yu. His actors stopped acting with their eyes, and started acting with their bodies. The other major novelty popularized by Sun Yu was unprec-edented dynamic camera work. Sun Yu contributed to the spreading of complicated pan movements, tracking shots, and crane shots. At the time, these techniques were major innovations, shifting from static, the-atrical representation, where the camera was at the same height and angle as the spectator’s gaze in a theater, staring fixedly at the scene.

I would like to focus here on some examples of significant mobile framing in Daybreak, as a case study. The movie tells the story of a young couple, Lingling (Li Lili) and her cousin (Gao Zhanfei 高占非) arriving from the countryside to Shanghai.

Figure 2: Li Lili back home. Figure 3: Li Lili in Shanghai.

They live a poor but happy life in a cramped apartment and they work in a textile factory. Sun Yu edited parallel images of a wheelbarrow unload-ing some raw material, with a high angle shot of the workers coming out of the factory, showing the massification of human labor (and perhaps paying homage to the very first movie ever made, which showed the workers coming out of the Lumière factories in Lyon). The contrast of the darkness of the city with the bright light of the countryside is explic-it. The big city is merciless: the boy is fired by the evil capitalist, and a descent to hell starts for Lingling; she is raped and sold to prostitution. She understands, however, that the human heart is not solely responsible for her situation, but society itself has played its part, and she devotes her charm to revolutionary activity, becoming a spy for the revolution. She is discovered while hiding her former lover, turned revolutionary. Rather than sell him out, she sacrifices her own life. In the end, she is shot dead,

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but her example moves one of the soldiers, who then rouses his fellow soldiers to rebel against the tyrannical generals. He too is shot, but the camera rises, and, behind the wall of the execution ground, a new dawn casts its rays of hope on the martyred city.

The movie is rich in formal inventions. The following is one of the most stunning examples of Sun Yu’s fluid, critical, sensual and poetic realism. We are at minute 00:34. In her obscure cramped Shanghainese room, Lingling is framed from a high angle, weeping over her lost innocence.

Figure 4: Cramped apartment in Shanghai

Iris shot: Same frame, same angle, but now the girl is on a boat, still young, back in her fishermen’s village. It is a flashback showing an ideal-ized past of innocence and youth. The contrast with the present, when the character is obliged to prostitute her body to spy for the revolution, is tragic and heroic. Other differences between the two frames: in Shanghai, the light is low key; the girl is sitting in the dark. In the flashback, we are almost blinded by the light. After this symbolic contrast between the past and present, rhetorically obtained solely by the juxtaposition of two sim-ilarly framed images, Sun Yu utilizes another innovative technique —the girl is on a boat with her boyfriend, the boat is sailing, and a composite construction of a series of high-angle long shots, close-ups and slow pans follows the dawdling sliding of the boat between lotus flowers. The girl is lying down on the boat, and she is extremely sensual, but innocent at the same time. Her bare legs, her open smile, her nonchalant Lolita pose com-municate great seduction, but also a realism never seen before on the Chi-nese screen. The high angle shot is followed by a shot/reverse shot of the subjective views of the two young people gazing at each other with frank

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smiles and seductive eyes. This direct representation of their bodies and desire expresses a new ideal of youth: free, emancipated, determined and strong. The spontaneity and joy with which Sun Yu represents the young bodies of his protagonists, male and female, via formal devices inspired by Hollywood “naturalism”, breaks free of the constraints of previous repre-sentations anchored to theater conventions, aiming to relocate the politi-cal push to free the nation, women and youth in their own bodies. Not only women are revisited and recreated in Sun Yu’s poetics, for a sensuous tracking shot accompanies the march of the bare-chested virile heroes of The Big Road. Here, we can find the crafting of a new ideal for Chinese men—an anticipation of the iconic Maoist martyr.

In The Big Road, the young protagonists are building a road that will lead the Nationalist army to fight the Japanese invaders. Their bodies are fol-lowed by a long and sensuous tracking shot that expresses their youthful energy, as well as the idea of an entire nation marching towards indepen-dence. There is something literally stretching out towards liberation, to-wards emancipation, towards empowerment. The movement of the cam-era, the novelty of the tracking shot, the dynamism never seen before of the interaction between the camera work and the bodies of the young characters, all lend a special, “modern”, blatant, energetic and fresh meaning to the ideological image of the newly constructed social class, that is, young romantic rebels in a young China. Again in The Big Road, we witness a spectacular 360°pan shot that films the friends all around a table talking and laughing, uniting their faces in the same sequence and, symbolically, in the same battle. Constructed camera movements collab-orate to build a sense of unity that is both visual and ideological. The

Figure 5: Shot of Li Lili andJin Yan.

Figure 6: Reverse shot of Li Lili and Jin Yan.

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movie also experiments with high and low angle alternative frames and crane shots (the final massacre, coming from the enemy planes). An ex-tremely low angle shot can be observed in the battle sequence of Day-break. Partly due to the constraints of a low budget, Sun Yu does not show the armies fighting, but uses dynamic frame work to represent the fast progression of the revolutionary army. From a low angle, he shows us the soldiers running above the camera lenses, disappearing out of the picture in a fast movement conveying energy and their fighting spirit.

More use of complex mobile frame engineering is seen in Little Toys, where long, reflective tracking shots follow the protagonists as they walk and talk their way along the familiar, ancestral village roads. As in some films by Naruse Mikio 成瀬巳喜男, walking together is a sign of acknow-ledgment and the sharing of common values. And in subsequent shots depicting the war, the shifting direction of the tracking sensitively ex-presses the feeling of lost hopes and the despair of the characters lost in the tsunami of history.

Another Sun Yu technique that was to develop and spread in China consists of the manually operated crane-up: with a vertical movement from the lower to the upper floors of the buildings of Shanghai (we see it in Daybreak, Wild Rose, and Queen of Sport), Sun Yu depicts the multilayered class struggle of the big city. This was a particularly original way to envi-sion a new modern, westernized way of filmmaking. The first occurrence in Daybreak takes place at minute 00:34. A young couple has just arrived in town. They take the inevitable (as the intertitles tell us) city tour, and are then welcomed to their new apartment. The crane follows the charac-ters climbing up the stairs with a vertical movement, as they pass by dif-ferent apartments. By means of this particularly dynamic and fluid move-ment, the audience is introduced to Shanghai’s living situation, which is cramped and crowded. The verticality tells of the tall building craze in ur-ban China at the time (and now as well, for that matter). The movement tells of the fluidity of social life and the fast-paced social transformation. The style—relying on different spaces with a fluid movement—tells of the vitality of a cinema experimenting with all kinds of new devices and the content reveals the proximity of the different family units—giving both the idea of mutual community help and the idea of big-brother-like con-trol by means of the moralistic gaze of the neighbors. Finally, the move-ment suggests the possibility of rapid ascent, as well as —being a melodra-matic film—the vertiginous descent awaiting the young couple.

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Later, an extremely significant crane-up closes the film—starting from minute 01:37. In the final sequences of Daybreak, Sun Yu creates an icon for the century, in the persona of the young, rebellious, spontaneous and heroic Li Lili, elevated by sensuous mobile framing. Sun Yu was admit-tedly inspired by Hollywood movie stars such as Lilian Gish, Mary Pick-ford, and Janet Gaynor.24 He was the first Chinese filmmaker to enjoy first-hand experience with the modern movie-going craze. However, the aura of Hollywood movies stars was shining in China too, on the screen and in the press. Anne Kerlan-Stephens and Marie-Claire Quiquemelle see in the final sequence of Daybreak an homage to Marlene Dietrich her-self, particularly to Dishonored (Joseph Von Sternberg, 1931). In both mov-ies, the protagonists walk to their end—the firing squad—fiercely defying the perturbed gaze of the soldiers.25 If Marlene brandishes her mythical cigarette, Li Lili lets her beautiful smile shine over her dark fate. Lingling accepts her destiny, she does not betray her lover, and she accepts death by the firing squad. She does this with two conditions though, both relat-ed to her image. In the first place, she wants to face death dressed in her village clothes. She refuses her evening dress, her refined but corrupted camouflage, and chooses to return to her “original” identity, which repre-sents purity, innocence, and ultimately, the inner, original strength of the Chinese soul. Her second condition: she wants to smile. She is going to die, but she wants her death to be a symbol of future hope, of optimism, of a fighting spirit, of martyrdom. It is noteworthy that Lingling, in en-dorsing the revolutionary cause, understood the importance of the image, of the symbol. Thanks to her village dress and girlish smile, Lingling is not a simple individual girl, for she represents all of China’s youth.

Later, the image of the martyr will become central to the poetics of Communist fiction and cinema—note for example the iconic characters of the White-Haired Girl and the Red Detachment of Women—and would be utilized in various forms (film, ballet, opera, the radio play, and the com-ic book) during Maoism. Recently, the figure of the female spy shot dead by collaborators has been revived by the controversial Lust, Caution (Si, jie色.戒 Ang Lee 李安, 2007). As noted above, Daybreak ends with a man-ually operated crane-up. The eye of the camera gazes at the young girl and the soldier shot dead. They lay in a plastic position (we can also note an error in continuity, given that in the previous shot the two bodies were in different positions). They represent the young martyrs of China, op-pressed by patriarchal authority and the military, tyrannical government

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at the service of foreign imperialism. Then, slowly, the camera rises up, showing, behind the wall, the roofs of the city, and the sun coming up. It is the dawn cited in the title, representing future hope for China.

Figure 7: Final shot of Daybreak.

This camera movement refers to the by now classical ending of the Hol-lywood paradigm: an external eye, looking down upon all human misery, becoming detached from it, signifying the end of the story, and bidding farewell. Here, Sun Yu utilizes this trope, adding a moral implication: what people behind the wall cannot see – for they can see only death, de-feat, foolishness—is a bright future arriving from afar. He portrays the martyr, the rebellious hero in order to signify the sufferance of China, and to demand a reaction from the crowd. This crane-up movement is a revelation—dawn is not far from coming—and a call to arms—we should rise and march towards it.

I am not suggesting here that Sun Yu was the only one to acknowledge and develop the specificities of the cinema medium, nor that the ability to use these techniques in a symbolic, poetic and effective way originated exclusively from his education in New York. Definitively, however, the familiarity with the most progressive techniques of filmmaking and the solid technical education he received in the U.S. gave him a mature vision of the new media, and helped him develop an original visual style that was both universally effective and deeply concerned with the politics of China. His works helped to create “a progressive cosmopolitanism strand of Shanghai cinema.”26 As mentioned above, along with this revolution-ary and coherent use of camera movements, Sun Yu developed an inno-vative way of directing his actors and actresses, aiming towards “real-

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ism.” Consistently, he asks them to be “natural,” and, even though today this acting no longer seems “realistic,” compared with more formulaic, static, expressionist performance of movie stars at the time, Sun Yu’s heroes and heroines are incredibly spontaneous and generous.

This image of youth is functional to the idealist project of Sun Yu, and of numerous intellectuals of the time. It is both a calling to arms addressed to a new generation of young people, and a description that insists that Chinese youth are not weak, and shall not be. Utilizing the “western” tech-nique of cinematography, which he apprehended in loco, Sun Yu shifts the representation of the intellectual heroes from that of a weak scholar and a submissive refined young lady to an image of strength, energy, and engage-ment.27 Along the tragic path of his heroes and heroines—revolutionary martyrs, saint-like prostitutes, but also common young women who sacri-fice their pride to collective honor as in the Queen of Sport – Sun Yu elabo-rates a new ideal of battling youth. His movies remain largely popular (or “vernacular”) and endorse the melodramatic mode to call for public response and reaction.28 Like other members of intellectual circles of the time (to which he was closely tied), the director called “the poet of the silver screen” rejected western and Japanese imperialism while appropriat-ing western democratic ideals, romantic momentum, a fascination with science and social progress, and representational techniques.

His visual style, the way of filming young bodies that are leaning straight ahead towards the camera, and the idealization of the (paradoxically) real-istic push towards progress and rebellion, often interrupted by war, society and religion, portray the patriotic engagement of Sun Yu, as well as an aes-thetic ideal made of freedom, liberty and sensuality, an ideal for the build-ing of a new generation that may embody the future of China itself.

Figures 8 & 9: The natural grace of Li Lili.

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ENDNOTES

1. Tadao Sato, Le Cinéma japonais (Paris : Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997).

2. Tadao Sato, “Le cinéma japonais et le cinéma chinois face la tradition”, in

Marie-Claire Quiquemelle and Jean-Loup Passek eds., Le Cinéma chinois (Par-

is : Centre George Pompidou, 1985), 77–84.

3. Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema. The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema

Movement, 1932–1937 (Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 148.

4. Regis Bergeron, Le Cinema Chinois: 1905–1949 (Alfred Eibel editeur, 1977).

For an overview of early Chinese cinema, see also Quiquemelle and Passek;

Zhang Yingjin, Chinese National Cinema (New York and London: Routledge,

2004); Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949 (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1987); Jiao Xiongping焦雄屏, Shidai xianying:

Zhong Xi dianying lunshu 時代顯影 : 中西電影論述 [Historical developments:

discussion of Oriental and Western cinemas] (Taibei: Yuanliu, 1998), 15–80;

Poshek Fu, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong. The Politics of Chinese Cinema

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Cheng Jihua 程季華, Zhongguo

dianying fazhan shi 中國電影發展史 [History of Chinese Cinema] (Beijing:

Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1963); Dai Xiaolan戴小蘭, Zhongguo wusheng

dianying 中國無聲電影 [Chinese silent Cinema] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying,

1996); Chen Bo 陳播, Zhongguo zuoyi dianying yundong 中國左翼電影運動 [Chi-

nese Left Wing Cinema] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1993); Xianggang

Zhongguo dianying xuehui 香港中國電影學會 Tansuo de niandai, 探索的年代

[Origins of Chinese Cinema] (Hong Kong, Hong Kong Arts Center, 1984);

Xiao Zhiwei, “Cinema cinese. Il periodo del muto 1896-1936 [Silent Chinese

Cinema 1896–1936],” in Gian Piero Brunetta, ed., Storia del cinema mondiale.

Vol. 4 (Torino: Einaudi, 2001), 715–737; Li Suyuan 酈蘇元et Hu Jubin 胡菊彬

(Zhonggguo wusheng dianying shi 中國無聲電影史 [History of Chinese Silent

Cinema] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1997); Laikwan Pang; Hu Junbin, Pro-

jecting a Nation. Chinese National Cinema Before 1949 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong

University Press, 2003).

5. Occidentalism is a very slippery notion. Chen Xiaomei, in Occidentalism: A

Theory of Counter-discourse in Post-Mao China (New York and Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1995) underscores the positive effects of using the “Other”

(here, Chen refers to some literary texts of western culture) as an inspiration-

al force to empower the submitted; she is also well aware of the risk involved

in such an intellectual enterprise. “Occidentalism” is a notion inspired by the

popular concept of “orientalism” proposed by Edward Said (Orientalism, New

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York, Vintage, 1979); it aims to be its complementary analytical tool. See also

Ian Buruma and Avishai Marglit, Occidentalism (London: Atlantic, 2005).

6. Laikwan Pang, 145–148.

7. Anne Kerlan-Stephens and Marie-Claire Quiquemelle, “La compagnie ciné-

matographique Lianhua et le cinéma progressiste chinois: 1930–1937”, in

Arts Asiatiques, No. 61 (2006): 5.

8. Nick Brown, “Society, and Subjectivity: On the Political Economy of Chinese

Melodrama,” in Nick Browne et al., eds., New Chinese Cinemas. Forms, Identi-

ties, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 ), 40–56; Wimal

Dissanayake, ed., Melodrama and Asian Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1993), Stephen Teo, “Il genere wenyi: una esegesi del melo-

dramma cinese” [The wenyi genre: the Chinese melodrama], in Festival del

cinema di Pesaro, Stanley Kwan. La via orientale al melodramma (Roma: Il Cas-

toro, 2000).

9. Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–

1937 (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 30. To be noted

that since melodrama is to some degree a foreign concept, the Chinese trans-

lation is shifting. It is often rendered as tongsu ju 通俗剧, where tongsu means

“popular “and ju “play, drama”. Zhang Zhen refers to baihua literature. “Ver-

nacular literature” is written as baihua 白话 “common language”. Other pos-

sible translations of melodrama include 情节剧 qingjie ju “narrative drama” (as

opposed to opera) and 文艺片 wenyi pian “literature-art films”. Realism is an

evasive term as well. We find both 写实主义 xieshi zhuyi “writing the real, con-

crete, actual” and 现实主义 xianshi zhuyi “present reality”. Both are ideologi-

cally burdened, since zhuyi stands for –ism. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar,

discussing early Chinese cinema, write: “melodramatic realism is a major

strain in the Chinese cinema because its central theme of outraged innocence

was often perceived as real in national, and not just personal, terms. […]

melodramatic realism is the mixed mode of the national” in China On Screen.

Cinema and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 82.

10. 對於中國來說,電影則是“舶來品”,中國傳統文化與電影並無直接的血緣關系。中國電

影百年來的生命歷程,不斷受到歐風美雨的吹拂浸染,可謂是受歐美文化影響最深的文

藝樣式。(…) 在中國電影所受到的外來影響中,美國好萊塢電影文化的影響最為深

遠。(…) 即使后來某些科班出身的編導,如洪深、孫瑜等,也是在美國學習的戲劇和電

影,他們關於電影的理論知識和創作經驗,也較多的來自於美國的電影文化,所以其創作

也無法完全擺脫好萊塢電影潛移默化的影響。例如，1930年孫瑜在聯華影業公司編導

的影片《野草閑花》，就是受到了美國影片《七重天》的啟發和影響而創作的。故

而，從20年代中國電影的總體創作情況來看，盡管也有少數影片觸\u21450 及社會現

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實問題，表現出進步的思想意識，但大多數影片凸現了電影的商業性和娛樂性，往往

是對好萊塢電影簡單的借鑒和模仿，“美”化傾向十\u20998 分嚴重。Zhou Binde周

斌德 “百年中國電影與中外文化” (One hundred years of Chinese cinema and its

relation to foreign cultures”, in Theory People, http://theory.people.com.cn/

BIG5/49167/ 3855547.html, 25/06/09. Unfortunately, Wild Flowers (Yecao

xianhua, 1931) is considered to have been lost.

11. Thus defined by scholar Linda Lai on her very creative web site: Linda Lai,

“Big Road, an Eclectic Text”, Linda Lai Floating Site, http://www.lindalai-

floatingsite.com/contents /writings/Bg/ index.html (27/06/09). It is note-

worthy that in the Chinese version of the same text, the notion of “critical

realism” is rendered as “社會良心的鏡子shehui liangxin de jingzi,” its literary

translation being “mirror of social conscience”. It appears that in the Chinese

language context it is even harder to use the concept/term of “realism” than

in an English language context.

12. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York:

McGraw-Hill, 2001), 157. See also Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment,

Realism and Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

13. Laikwan Pang, 200.

14. Laikwan Pang, 200; Zhang Zhen also talks about a “growing popular ‘taste

for reality’” when discussing long narrative films and the cinema boom of the

early 1920s. Zhang Zhen, 38.

15. It might be useful to mention briefly that even if Hollywood is often per-

ceived today as a monolithic force imposing its dominion on the imagination

of the global audience, it does and did have a plurality of souls and, what is

more important here, it was created thanks to the meeting of different, het-

erogeneous narrative and visual traditions.

16. It may be a common stereotype, but Chinese culture loves its cuisine: Sun Yu

defines its cinema (and, indirectly, himself) as zasui 杂碎 or chop-suey (which

brings to mind the famous self-definition of Ozu Yasujiro 小津安二郎 as a

tofu-maker). See Sun Yu 孫瑜, Yinhai fanzhou – huiyi wo de yisheng 銀海泛舟- 回

憶我的一生 [Floating on the screen. Memories of my Life], Shanghai, Shang-

hai Wenyi chubanshe, 1987; and Sun Yu, Dalu zhi ge 大路之歌 [Song of The Big

Road] (Taibei: Yuanliu, 1990). Note that the “traditional” chop-suey dish is

not traditional at all, but instead a “construction” of the Chinese diaspora;

see Gregory B. Lee, Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chi-

neseness Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003).

17. I make reference here to the famous Song of Midnight (Yeban gesheng夜半歌聲,

Maxu Weibang馬徐維邦, 1937), allegedly the first Chinese horror flick, a pas-

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sionate mélange of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), The Phantom of the Opera

(Rupert Julian, 1925) and local revolutionary epic melodrama.

18. Bergeron, 69–72.

19. Kerlan-Stephens and Quiquemelle, 11.

20. Pang, 148.

21. It should be mentioned that one of the first Chinese male movie stars was of

Korean origin. Like “Americanization”, “Pan-Asiatism” also played a part in

influencing Chinese cinema. from the very beginning. On Jin Yan, see Rich-

ard J. Meyer, Jin yan: the Rudolph Valentino of Shanghai (Hong Kong: Hong

Kong University Press, 2009).

22. Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China (London: Hurst & Com-

pany, 1995).

23. Which reminds us of the fascination with the modern “sirens” expressed by

the Japanese writer Tanizaki Jun’ichiro 谷崎潤一郎 in his novels and screen-

plays.

24. Sun Yu 孫瑜, Yinhai fanzhou—huiyi wo de yisheng 銀海泛舟- 回憶我的一生 [Float-

ing on the screen. Memories of my Life], (Shanghai : Shanghai Wenyi chu-

banshe, 1987), 30.

25. Kerlan-Stephens and Quiquemelle, 11.

26. Zhen, 289.

27. A traditional model: Song Geng, The Fragile Scholar. Power and Masculinity in

Chinese Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004); Stephen

Teo, Hong Kong. The Extra Dimensions (London: BFI Publishing, 1997).

28. “Sun’s commitment to both social progress and cinematic innovation led

him to create a particular film language that may be called ‘unofficial/popular

discourse,’ which for my purpose, may be reformulated as ‘vernacular’ dis-

course”; Zhang Zhen, 296–297.

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CHAPTER 9

IF AMERICA WERE REALLY CHINA OR HOW CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS DISCOVERED ASIA

-------------------------------

gREgORY LEE

“They have not yet realized, that time having manufactured time,

that we have finally become them.”

— Rafaël Confiant Case à Chine1

the chinese first populated America three millennia ago, and have been going there regularly ever since. Chinese American author Shawn Wong’s hero in Homebase gets this story from an old Native American encountered on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Angel Island was the “back door” Ellis Island, a detention centre where would-be Chinese immigrants were held in the early twentieth-century, while their family affiliations and right to immigrate were verified; “normal” immigration procedures for Chinese were suspended by the 1882 Exclusion Law. The legislation denied right of entry and American citizenship to all Chinese except those who were close relatives of existing American citizens. When the hero of Wong’s novel visits the detention centre on the island in the 1970s it is abandoned, derelict and about to be demolished.

‘You know people say I look Chinese.’ [said the old Indian]

…

‘People say I look Chinese,’ he repeated.

I looked at him in the dim light. He did look Chinese.

‘Where are you from,?’ I asked.

‘Acoma’.

‘Lots of Chinese in New Mexico?’

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He started laughing and lit up another cigarette. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Berkeley.’

‘Where are you from originally?’

‘Berkeley.’

‘How long you been here?’

‘Three days.’

‘No. How long you been in the United States?’

‘All my life.’

‘You mean you ain’t born in China.’

‘What do you mean? Don’t I look like I come from Gallup?’

‘You ain’t Navajo. You Chinese. You like me.’

‘You ain’t Chinese, though.’

‘My ancestors came from China thirty thousand years ago and settled in

Acoma Pueblo.’

‘Is that why you look Chinese?’

‘Naw, my grandfather was Chinese.’

‘Your grandfather was Chinese?…’

‘He wandered into New Mexico and married a widow before anyone

knew he was Chinese.’ 2

An old “Indian,” a “native” American, Chinese because his ancestors im-migrated tens of thousands years ago, but also Chinese and “native” be-cause his grandfather in the nineteenth-century immigrated to Califor-nia and married a “native” American.

In between the two migratory moments, according to a Chinese seventeenth century history book, America was “re-discovered,” and named Fusang 扶桑, the equivalent, in the pre-modern Chinese world-vision of the lost continent of Atlantis. The Chinese Buddhist missionary Hui Shen 慧深 (in Japanese, Kei-shin) around the year 500 had set sail from China's eastern seaboard and hit land 10,000 kilometres east of China.3 Once he had returned to China Hui Shen made a report of his discovery to the Emperor who reacted with some indifference to the news4 what interested the supreme rulers of China more than finding a continent, was finding the substance that would give them longevity, if not eternal life, and indeed in the third century before our era numerous maritime missions had been dispatched in the vain search for plants that would enhance life expectancy. Of what interest was Fusang, yet to be named America, if it could not provide this? Almost a thousand years

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after Hui Shen’s voyage, Chinese ships again arrived in America, beating Columbus to the post by a number of decades. The Chinese explorer was Zheng He, an imperial eunuch appointed admiral of the fleet by the Ming Emperor Zhu Di. However, once again the Chinese sailed away, and that is why there is today no United States of Fusang, and also why the capital is not Zhu Di City, District of Zhenghe, but rather Washington, District of Columbia, USA.

It was in the mid-to-late nineteenth century that the dream of Amer-ica, of California, of the Gold Rush, that gave us the Chinese translation of San Francisco—Old Gold Mountain 舊金山—became immensely at-tractive to a southern Chinese population devastated by the economically ruinous impact of British imperialist encroachment. The opium trade which Britain and other powers had forced upon China, waging the Opium Wars in order to prise open its ports and hinterland, literally im-poverished southern China and led millions to seek economic refuge over-seas.5 Many were tempted by contracts which left them virtually enslaved as coolies in foreign lands. Their preferred destination was America, coun-try of the Fakei/Huaqi 花棋 “flowery flag”, as the Stars and Stripes were

Figure 1: A 1763 Chinese map of the world, claiming to be a reproduction of a 1418 map after descriptions of Zheng He’s voyages.

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called by the Chinese. The United States were also known as Meiguo 美國 “the beautiful country”, or again simply as America, transliterated as A-mei-lei-ga 亞美利加 in Cantonese.6 It was a land, particularly after the Rush following the mid-nineteenth-century discovery of the precious metal in California, where the streets were reputed to be paved with gold. For the Chinese America was not a utopian refuge from persecution as it was for many European immigrants, but rather a temporary detour made necessary by economic hard times in China, as the straightforward lyrics from a nineteenth-century Cantonese folk song illustrate:

爸爸去金山

快快要寄銀

全家靠住你

有銀好寄回

Father has gone to Gold Mountain

Hurry up and send money

The whole family is counting on you

When you have money send it back quick.7

But the Chinese need to find alternative sources of income and wealth by emigrating to California also coincided with mid-nineteenth century America’s need to rebuild itself as a nation-state.

When Baudrillard declares in his Amérique (America) that twentieth-century America has no problem of identity, and that it does not “culti-vate origins and mythic authenticity,” he neglects the ideological work of the nineteenth-century that inscribed the myth of America as the land of refuge welcoming those seeking justice and liberty.8 The historical reality is that that myth of America as a generous haven for all the world’s down-trodden which is so much a part of its modern identity, and is even inscribed in the form of the words of Emma Lazarus on the base of the Statue of Liberty, is founded on a lack of memory, not to say a lie. Amer-ica had to re-imagine and reconstruct itself: to institute the imaginary America that Walt Whitman had mapped out in verse. In order to do so post-bellum America, now settled within its new northern and southern borders, and which had now “pacified the Far West” by practically anni-hilating the indigenous population, was in need of another vision of alterity against which to construct itself. This Other was to be found

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across the “American lake,” across the Pacific, in the form of the Celestial Empire, China.

Thus, China was imagined and represented as decadent, old, decrepit, a faded civilization ill-adapted to the new industrial and scientific world of which America would become the herald and the embodiment. But if China was decadent and backward so must be its people. So how was it possible to denigrate China without denigrating its people, and indeed its emigrants? And what place could such degenerate “untouchables” have in the new consolidated United States of America? And so over a period of several decades propagandists and politicians militated for the legal and actual exclusion of Chinese from America. The project to exclude Chinese people from America, from citizenship, and from simply being American, started around 1850, was partly accomplished by 1870, with the Naturalization Act which denied the right of naturalization to Chinese, and was formally concluded with the adopting of Exclusion Act of 1882.9

Figure 2: The Statue of Liberty welcomed millions of passengers to the New World while the Chinese were juridically excluded from America.

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gregory lee

Furthermore, so as to protect Americans and Americaness in China, a legal and jurisdictional cocoon was constructed. In 1844 the United States became the first nation to demand and obtain extra-territorial rights for its citizens in China; a situation which ensured their immunity from Chinese law. Americans thus removed themselves from Chinese jurisdiction. Juridically Americans when in China were in America. By the same token, the Chinese were excluded even in their own country. By the turn of the century so naturalized and legitimate had this system of extraterritoriality become that Congress, in 1906, established the United States District Court for China.10 Academia made its contribution in the person of Andrew D. White, president of Cornell University, who lent his support to Senator Sargent, the prime advocate of the exclusionists in Congress. According to the 1877 congressional record, White expressed a “deep-seated dread of this influx of Asiatics of a type which it seems to me can never form any hopeful element in this nation.”

In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act passed the House of Representa-tives with 201 votes in favour and a mere 37 against the measure. It thus became practically impossible for new Chinese immigrants to enter the country. After the 1882 Exclusion Act had been passed, there followed a second set of measures aimed at maintaining American “purity”: almost every state in the union passed anti-miscegenation laws preventing the marriage of whites with non-whites. As for the Chinese Exclusion Act, it was not finally repealed until 1943, and not until 1967 did the U.S. Supreme Court declare anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.

In the late nineteenth-century, for the millions legally excluded from the United States, the dream of America was displaced onto other regions in need of cheap labour: Australia, Canada, South Africa. But all of these would eventually put up barriers too. And then there were those Chinese who naively and unwittingly signed contracts which promised them Amer-ica, but which in reality took them to European colonies off the coast of the Americas where in the wake of the abolition of slavery Chinese and Indian coolies were used to replace the former African slaves.

The story of the exclusion of the Chinese is now well-known to those taking introductory courses in Asian American history in U.S. universities which over the past thirty years have developed ethnic American studies departments. They would also study that other history that is increas-ingly included in such courses: that of the unjust, and even illegal, intern-ment of Japanese Americans during the World War II in concentration

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camps in the American desert. While Americans whose forbears hailed from other belligerent states such as Germany and Italy did not suffer such a fate, Japanese Americans were not only denied their liberty but had to wait forty years for an apology from the American government. That these narratives should be part of “mainstream” American studies today seems self-evident, but they are not. And what was the fate of those attracted to but yet spurned by the dreamland that was America?

THE CARRIBEAN ROAD TO NEW YORK

“Martinique is a part of America. You just need to find the road to New

York and walk straight ahead, I tell you.”

— Raphaël Confiant, Case à Chine11

Raphaël Confiant has recently told the story of the Chinese coolie in the French Caribbean, the Chinese coolie who had “signed up” for America but found himself imprisoned on an island. Raphaël Confiant spent the first half of his literary career crafting a literary language out of the spo-ken language of the people of Martinique—a language shared by the de-scendants of white colonials, black slaves, the half-black bourgeoisie, and the descendants of Indian and Chinese migrant labourers.

Confiant now writes in French so as to reach a wider public, but still weaves Creole into his narratives. His latest work tells the story of the Chinese presence in Martinique, the story of the desperate economic and political conditions of mid to late nineteenth-century China that led many Chinese to leave for what they thought was America. The book is called Case à Chine (Chinese shack), in Creole: “Kay Chine”. At the out-set the young hero, Chen Sang, who, like a character in the fiction of magic realist Garcia Marquez, lives to a venerable old age of around a hundred years, is obliged to leave southern China and finds himself, hav-ing crossed three oceans, on Martinique. As Chen Sang’s grandson is told in the narrative:

You should know young man […] that in our race the men have always

dreamed of returning to their homeland, whereas the women, being more

realistic, have preferred to confront the real world. There are those, like

your grandfather who went even further in his fantasies, since it is told

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that he actually tried to get to New York. New York no less! It’s true, of

course, that in Canton and Shanghai the [coolie] traders had seduced our

ancestors with the word ‘America’. My mother often said that many emi-

grants had accepted to sign a contract because the word sounded sweet to

their ears. Laughable, isn’t it? 12

Like his fellow immigrants, Chen Sang had indeed signed a contract as an indentured laborer for a period of five years after which time he would theoretically be free to go back to China, almost no-one ever did. Side by side with his Indian counterparts, he cut the sugar cane that used to be cut by the African slaves, before the abolition of slavery.

Chinese and Indians were brought to numerous destinations in the Caribbean. The British, needless to say, brought in coolies to Jamaica and Trinidad, and the Spanish to Cuba. but also, as the dominant maritime power of the moment to Cuba. In 1858, the London Illustrated News re-ported:

Between November, 1854, and September, 1855 […] nearly 11,000 em-

barked for Cuba […] and amongst them the mortality before they got

to the end of their voyage was 14 ¾ per cent. Our laws, though well in-

tended, could not cover the whole case, and it is somewhat remarkable

that the mortality on board British vessels engaged in this traffic was

greater than the mortality in other vessels. When we find legislation at-

tains very imperfectly the objects it aims at more immediately within its

scope, we cannot be surprised that it should not be successful in dealing

with things so strange and so remote as the emigration of crowds of Chi-

namen […] The mode, too, in which they are sometimes collected is not

creditable. Chinese passage-brokers residing at Hong-Kong, often men

of straw, dispatch agents to the mainland, who seem to find plenty of per-

sons desirous to emigrate, or whom they tempt to emigrate, and who buy

of them, at five dollars a piece, a bargain-ticket signed by the broker. The

emigrants then repair to Hong-Kong, where they receive, on paying the

balance, a passage-ticket for California or Australia. The brokers thus

collect a great number of emigrants; and, having got their money, do not

always provide the passage, or they take up any old ship that offers. Our

Government, in spite of its many precautions, seems sometimes to be

made instrumental in helping the brokers to impose on the emigrants.

As it can scarcely prevent all abuses, it seems doubtful whether the

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Legislature should not withdraw from the attempt to regulate and organ-

ise the emigration of the Chinese.

The novel Monkey Hunting by Cristina Garcia tells a similar story to Con-fiant’s about Chinese immigration to Cuba:

The men [having arrived in Havana] were ordered to peel off their filthy

rags and were given fresh clothes to present themselves to the Cubans.

But there was no mistaking their wretchedness: bones jutted from their

cheeks; sores cankered their flesh. Not even a strict regimen of foxglove

could have improved their appearance. The recruits were rounded up in

groups of sixty-wood haulers and barbers, shoemakers, fishermen, farm-

ers—then parceled out in smaller groups to the waiting landowners. A

dozen Cubans on horseback, armed with whips, led the men like a herd

of cattle to the barracón to be sold. Inside, Chen Pan was forced to strip

and be examined for strength, like horses or oxen that were for sale in the

country districts of China. Chen Pan burned red with shame, but he

didn’t complain. Here he could no longer rely on the known ways. Who

was he now without his country?

One hundred fifty pesos was the going rate for a healthy chino. A

Spanish landowner paid two hundred for him, probably on account of his

height. His father had taught him that if you knew the name of a demon,

it had no power to harm you. Quickly, Chen Pan asked one of the riders

for the name of his buyer. Don Urbano Bruzón de Peñalves. How [in the

world] would he ever remember that? […] Now there was no question of

his purpose in Cuba. He was there to cut sugar cane. All of them were.

Chinos. Asiáticos. Culís. Later, there would be other jobs working on the

railroads or in the copper mines of El Cobre, five hundred miles away. But

for now what the Cubans wanted most were strong backs for their

fields.13

Chinese immigration to Cuba left its traces not only in Cuba but also in the Cuban émigré population in the United States; in New York for in-stance the Cuban-Chinese hybrid restaurant has been for decades a ma-jor feature of Manhattan’s multicultural landscape. In Confiant’s story the Chinese never get to New York. Sino-Caribbean hybridity remains Sino-french, Sino-Creole, Sino-Martiniquais, finally just Martiniquais.

The Chinese coolie in Confiant’s story, Chen Sang eventually runs

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away from the sugar plantation having slaughtered an intolerable over-seer. Refusing to believe that he is on an island, still seeking his America, his utopia like a character in a frenetic and ex-centric version of the Wiz-ard of Oz, he treks its length and breadth of the Caribbean island looking for the (yellow brick) road to America.

Chen Sang had roamed all over the southern part of the land, moving

only by night and living off roots he found along the borders of the plan-

tations. He almost gave in to despair when he realized that everywhere

the sea presented an obstacle to his dreams [...] So this land was a an island

after all, as the cane-cutters beside whom he had laboured so many years

had always maintained […] The Chinese had not believed them. [Chen

Sang would tell them:] “You are talking rubbish! Martinique is a part of

America. You just need to find the road to New York and walk straight

ahead, I tell you.”

And there all he was doing was repeating what the recruiters heralded

in the slum quarters of Canton they haunted offering to all who would

listen lashings of rice wine. […] [All this was confirmed] by the famous

Captain Morton. At the height of the storm which threatened to send the

good ship Galileo to depths of the ocean, the British officer had endlessly

harangued his crew and the emigrants:

‘Courage! Once we get through this, the gateway to the New World

will open wide to you!’

And didn’t the labour contract of the young Chen Sang not stipulate

that he was emigrating to ‘America’ for five years, at the end of which the

company was meant to repatriate him? […] [But try as he might he could

not obtain from the locals the slightest clue as to how to find the road

out.] New York, then, remained a big dream. He had been constrained to

sign a new contract since he did not have the wherewithal to pay his debts

at the plantation shop.14

If the story of Chen Sang can be encompassed by the metadiscipline of American studies, and I suggest that it can, the question becomes one of its boundaries. Should they be spatial, physical? Or temporal? For surely implied in the question “Who is America”, is embedded the question “When was America?” Or should they also relate to the imaginary, to the realm of desire, including unfulfilled desire? Is America not also the im-aginary that drove, and still drives so many, to risk their lives to reach it?

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Is America not also the little Americas that those who cannot physically attain America construct themselves, with the aid of Hollywood and glo-balized consumption practices, in Asia, in Africa, in Europe ? Is America not rather the Americas, and its margins?

Chen Sang, exhausted, hunted and starving is saved by a black woman who is full of character and with whom he goes on to found a hybrid dy-nasty. Finally, generations later, it falls to Raphaël, the namesake of the author, to tell the story of the Chinese on the island. Raphaël feels Chi-nese but also Martiniquais. The multiplicity, the singularity, the com-plexity of this mixed, intertwined ethno-linguistic community is fore-grounded towards the end of the book when Raphaël tells the part of the story that takes place in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The mystery of sounds, or more precisely, the relationship between

sounds and the meaning of words, intrigued me greatly. Having always

heard three languages at home – Creole, French and Chinese - having be-

come used to Spanish and English thanks to transistor radios that brought

us the rumba and calypso all day long, having witnessed the arguments in

Arabic between the Syrian shopkeepers along François-Argo Street as

well as the prayers spoken to Hindu gods in Tamil in the Au-Béraud dis-

trict, having heard all this had taught me the singularity of each, not in

each, but in us. I mean to say that when my great grandfather hinted, in

Chinese, that I should pay more attention to what he said, I who usually

only half-listened to what he was saying, he was not the same person as

when he told me the same thing in his hesitant and sometimes jumbled

French. As for Man Fideline [his very old black great grandmother], her

incessant jabbering during our walks downtown, in Creole and in Ba-

nana-French, paralleled my grandfather’s case. I was certain that chang-

ing language was equal to changing personality or inhabiting another

part of oneself. Myself, in Creole, I was the little negro-Chinese bastard,

a born vagabond, who took advantage of the absence of his teachers to

explore, in a gang, the forbidden quarters of the neighbourhood. On the

other hand in French, I became the good little boy who politely greeted

the adults and obeyed without complaint their commands. And the few

words of Chinese I could muster had the effect of transforming me into a

warrior. What would my grandfather have said had he known that I

would dream at night of being the sidekick of the legendary Chinese ban-

dit [he had fled during his youth], that warlord of Yunnan he so cursed.15

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Chineseness for Confiant is part of a larger composite universe that has coalesced in this officially French dominion, in this fictional, yet real, cor-ner of France separated from Paris by an ocean and 8,000 kilometres.

Confiant, describing the way in which the Chinese community is now part of the general, now hybrid, community that is Martinique, tells us:

When they [the majority] name us and nickname us all ‘China’—Mrs.

China, China-Chinese, China, Dr. China and so on—they believe they are

consigning us to what is indistinct, and of our lives, all they retain is what

they believe is our eternal passivity […] They have not yet realized, that

time having manufactured time, that we have finally become them. Not

the them they were before we landed in this land, this stump of earth that

forms part of this arc that constitutes such a pretty eyelash for America,

but a new ‘Us’ […] Our blood is mixed with theirs, against their will as

much as in line with their desire, our voices blend in gradually with their

songs, with their laughing […] Because the rotten luck is still there […]

Because we have to get over the mourning for the Land Before This One,

Because living together while being so different is such a challenge, Be-

cause to finally carry on one’s back the improbability of the whole world,

is no simple game, by God! 16

Case à Chine focusses on the Chineseness of Martinique’s community. But Confiant’s universe is much larger, taking in France, Britain, Euro-pean, Asian and African cultures in general. But his Europe and his France and his Africa and Asia are recounted spaces that are interweaved with strands of Chineseness, jumbled, left-behind, dislocated, an image of the history of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, the modernity of which colonialism was an intrinsic component whether in Havana, in Fort-de-France, or in Shanghai.

Yet was this very mixedness that late nineteenth-century scientific racism, which bolstered and justified colonialist practices, held responsi-ble for the non-white peoples supposed incapacity to govern themselves and to be intellectually productive. Legendre, for example, as late as 1925 was still profoundly attached to the scientific hierarchisation of races which accounted for racial degeneracy in terms of the “impregnation” by the non-white of pure racial national bodies. Thus, Chinese or “yellow” civilization can be discounted, and Chinese intelligence with it:

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There is, and there has never been, a yellow civilization, no more than

there has been a negro civilization. The white race alone, constituted of

Aryans and Semites, has been, in the history of peoples, a ferment of

intelligence and activity […] The Yellow is only a métis of conquering

whites and negroids.17

The Chinese people’s alleged mental weakness was also due to this wan-ton mixing of “races”:

To what then should this deficiency in the Chinese brain be attributed?

Without doubt to the catastrophic reaction of this mass of negroids and

métis—the Yellow—forming the majority of the population and whose

blood, by dint of a widely practiced polygamy, impregnated the elite,

originally of white race.18

But the fact that this very mixedness, this membrane of practices result-ing from forced hybrid cultural matrices, whether individual or commu-nal, have been a central constituent in the new writing of the late twen-tieth century is evident from the corpus of twentieth-century literature that starts with Joyce. That it may constitute the acknowledged vector of writing and representation of the twenty-first century depends on our capacity constantly to remember, to re-memorize, and to re-fashion its lessons in a constantly changing globalized socio-cultural environment.

A FILM YET TO BE MADE: THE STORY OF CHAN/CHEN

I have made little reference to film so far, not because there have not been filmic representations of Chinese in America or of Chinese Americans, but because the film that would comprehensively relate the complexity of the story of Chinese (in) America has not been and perhaps could not be made. One Chinese American film in particular pointed to this probable impossibility: The film Chan is Missing, a mystery set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, told the allegorical story of a Chinese cab driver who went missing with a large sum of money.19 The film recounts and represents the fruitless search of two of his fellow taxi drivers, and business partners, for Chan Hung. The representation of the quest provides the opportunity to

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show aspects of Chinatown daily life that were, and for most remain, un-known to the American movie spectator. In American studies, and in American cultural production, Chan is still missing. S/he is still missing because “mainstream” America, and American studies while making a place for non-white America, for Ethnic Studies departments and Asian American studies programmes, is still, despite the rhetoric of tolerance and multiculturalism, incapable of integrating Chinese American writing and history and film into its logic and its consciousness. What is more, the text below indicates, if the earlier racist discourse is now sublimated in the pub-lic media, there persists an exotic marginalizing vision of Chineseness in America indicative of an incapacity to see that what is at stake is not just minority history but a history that interrogates and calls for a revision of the story of the totality that would be American history were it written.

In Canton Chan had bought a ticket for California, but they had transported him to this overgrown island, a fact he did not understood until many years later having marched through the desert from Mel-bourne to Durban without finding the Old Gold Mountain, a much larg-er undertaking than circumscribing Martinique.20

Chan would played rugby in Australia, which was somewhat ironic since he had been banned and barred from the whites-only colony sev-eral times. Chan was playing a modern-day enforcer’s role now, “physical presence combined with skill,” said the sports paper, which was once again ironic since in previous decades not only was Chan classified a weakling but was also described as degenerate, unbalanced, demented and generally mentally deficient. A diet of Australian dairy food and or-ganic barbecued tofu had evidently resulted in fortifying Chan’s phy-sique and in changing his mind. But what had changed the white Austral-ian’s mind? Never mind. The sports report described Chan as “a late bloomer.” Very late in fact since he had not been allowed into the game for more than a century. “But this was not a gentleman’s game.” And Chan was still waiting to take a wicket.

The restaurant that Chan opened in Minnesota got mixed reviews – well, Chan had never been near up a wok before arriving in America. “I’ve been three times and have had so-so to bad experiences. First time I had the 3 seafood combo. It was delicately flavoured, i.e., a little dull. Last time I had beef with Chinese broccoli. But the beef was a bit tough and flavourless. Am I ordering the wrong things?”

“Oh no! Sorry to hear this as I was looking forward to trying Chan’s.”

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Chan was not cut out for catering. An illustrious moment in Chan’s career came with the winning of a local foundation arts prize. Chan was acclaimed, mostly by family and friends, “a major Napa Valley poet and visual artist.” Of course, Chan could not survive by poetry alone and had a day job as a visiting professor of the Hospitality Management Faculty of the Culinary Institute of America, Santa Barbara.

Despite not being a wizard with the wok, Chan was capable of mak-ing real fresh noodles from plain flour and water, just like grandfather had shown him. Flapping the elongated dough into longer and longer strips, he had looked like he was performing some elaborate kungfu ex-ercise in the dimly lit scullery in the old Edwardian house which had once been a seaman’s café for Chinese mariners who, legally obliged by Brit-ish and American laws, had manned the transatlantic convoys during World War Two. But the café had closed when all its clientèle was de-ported back to China in 1946 for having dared to demand equal wages with white seamen during the war. The Blue Funnel shipping company collaborated with Britain’s MI5 rounding up Chinese sailors in night raids and leaving thousands of white women to rear their children alone. That was why Chan was now penniless and why his grandchild watched mesmerised as the noodles took shape. But Americans wanted real noo-dles, yellow noodles out of a packet.

“I’m not suggesting that Chan’s is going downhill. It’s probably that I’m ordering the wrong things.”

“The key is not to expect too much or head to Vancouver or Toronto for the real deal.”

Chan indeed had frequented Canadian Chinatowns as early as the end of the nineteenth century. In 1883, Chan’s Canton-San Francisco passage ticket had been converted without his knowing into a Vancouver passage after the passing of the 1882 U.S. Exclusion Law rendered the landing of new immigrants impossible. Chan was later joined by other Chans. With great loss of face, since Louis, had not made good, they were obliged to work for Mr. Sin at number 7 Douglas St. They are all listed in the 1901 census:

08/19/14 chan, louis, m, lodger, s, May 10th, 1858, 42, CHN, to

Can: 1884, Conf, Laundry hand.

08/19/15 chan, long, m, lodger, s, December 4th, 1878, 22, CHN, to


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08/19/16 chan, foo, m, lodger, m, May 5th, 1864, 36, CHN, to Can:

1899, Conf, Laundry hand.

08/19/17 chan, tong, m, lodger, s, March 1st, 1879, 22, CHN, to


08/19/18 chan, ging, m, lodger, s, January 2nd 1877, 24, CHN, to


Chan was averse to laundering and found it as humiliating as the intel-lectual Chinese poet Wen Yiduo who would construct one of his better known “patriotic” poems around the shame of China reduced to a laundry service for Americans. Moreover, Chan had already been the object of a hate-campaign in England, in 1906. Chan’s laundry—accused of using Moonlight soap—was threatening English laundries that claimed that whites washed whiter.

“No laundry today,” said the chorus girl to Detective Chan. “So I notice,” retorted Chan, nodding towards the chorus girl’s scanty costume.

“I want to punch Charlie Chan in his too pregnant stomach that bellies out his white linen maternity suit.”

Chan went missing with the cab fare. And what a cab fare: $4,000!

“Nice set-up, but ultimately disappointing, but there were marvelous views of Chinese San Francisco.”

Chan was no peasant. He had studied for the Chinese civil service exam-inations, but found himself stymied by their abolition in 1905. He studied accountancy but found there was no post for a Chinese bank clerk in British Hong Kong. He had mastered English and even learnt French before shipping out. But somehow as hero of the Honolulu Police his linguistic skills disappeared to leave Chan talking like a fortune cookie (a great American invention, just like the chop suey roll):

“Dog afraid of losing job if make mistake, often fail to see tiger approach

of not instructed to watch for tiger.”

“Old fashioned detective have own poor methods.”

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In Hawaii, Chan also spent two years in gaol for laundering. Money that is. Chan had run a gambling operation from his back kitchen between 1987 and 1993. But Chan had been obliged to resort to such measures. Chan had been left penniless in California, all possessions having been lost when the family house had been burnt down in the arson attack on Santa Clara Chinatown during the late nineteenth-century Anti-Chi-nese Exclusion Campaign. But undaunted Chan moved back to Califor-nia. By 1997 things seemed to have changed for the better and Chan was elected California State Assemblywoman, even becoming Democratic Majority Leader in 2002.

There was the scenario. But the film has not yet been made.

*

I have thus far discussed different kinds of yearnings for America, of those seeking utopia, and of those searching simply for temporary eco-nomic relief. For some the desire for America was consummated but then disappointment followed as they were subjected to racist exclusion or marginalization. For others the desire was frustrated as their voyage led them not to America but to substitute Americas.

There is one further category of migration to America I should liked to mention, it is an emigration that is perhaps the most pervasive in the modern world: armchair migration, or immobile migration. Elsewhere in this volume the importance of American cinematic production and the impact of its processes on Chinese cinematic production has been dis-cussed. Here I refer not simply to dubbed American movies that have en-croached on, not to say dominated, world cinematographic and televisu-al consumption around the globe. In 2009, the Fall of the Berlin Wall was commemorated. In late 1989 the population of Eastern Europe sud-denly had access to a way of life they had not experienced directly before. But what they had experienced, and what perhaps fired their imagination physically to enjoy more of it, was the access to the televisual representa-tion of Western consumerism and in particular of the American dream. East German had since the late 1950s watched what their western com-patriots watched.

In China, where the Wall did not fall, the American model had been equally pervasive. Almost everything Western, including French critical

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theory that play an important part in the intellectual debate of the late 1980s, was filtered through America. And the tragic end to the democ-racy movement showed spectacularly the degree to which Chinese urban intellectual youth was wedded to the American ideology of liberty that was supposed to accompany capitalistic liberalization. When the God-dess of Democracy, a crude replica of the Statue of Liberty was, rolled into Tiananmen Square in late May, it was in ignorance of the historical context of China’s relationship with America: the sad irony being that as the Statue of Liberty began her reign over New York’s Ellis Island immi-gration station and welcomed the “huddled masses” of Europe, the Chi-nese had just been legally excluded from immigrating and from being American. On the other side of the continent would be Chinese immi-grants were greeted not by Liberty but by the detention camp on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.

Yet even after the the débâcle of June 1989, America remained the model of reference with which China’s authorities would inspire and chiv-vy on the country citizens to enter into the spirit of market capitalism. While the dissemination of the Hollywood cinematic product was still strictly controlled, the authorities allowed superficially ambiguous repre-sentations of the American way of life to be screened. While seemingly warning about the negative effects of American culture on Chinese values, the mini-series A Beijinger in New York simultaneously introduced the early 1990s Chinese spectator to the wonders of American capitalist life.

The mini-series soap A Beijinger in New York (Beijingren zai Niuyue) showed the early 1990s Chinese television spectator besuited profession-al white men sipping diet Coke, and chain smoking 555s, a brand of American cigarette which was particularly popular in China.

Soft drinks and cigarettes were the entry point of the Chinese con-sumer, as early as the beginning of the 1980s, to the American-style con-sumer utopia to which the Chinese authorities wished their people to as-pire. The domestic television soap opera Beijingren zai Niuyue (A Beijinger in New York), a twenty-one part television series, aired on Chinese televi-sion in the autumn and winter of 1993 was a Dallas-type soap opera, a text through which Chinese viewers could mediate their own popular ideology, which then was a collage of pre-Maoist “values” and remnants of post-1949 official Communist-promoted nationalist ideology. Then as today the officially inspired populist ideology emphasized, as had pre-revolutionary era Confucianism, the family unit.

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In the mid-1980s, when American televisual products were still invis-ible on Chinese TV screens, Latin American telenovelas dubbed into Chi-nese were screened two or three episodes back to back, and proved ex-tremely popular with Chinese television audiences. The soaps, in which the action took place principally indoors, lay great stress on apparent so-cial mobility, the illusion of choice and practices of consumption, and, beyond the superficial ideological message, these were the very concerns that Feng Xiaogang’s Beijingren represented and mediated. Ien Ang, not-ed how “personal life” provided the “ideological problematic” of the soap opera, the inner world, the family being “regarded as the ideal cra-dle for human happiness.”21 The external world, society, was what threat-ened the ideal.

The classic TV soap, Dallas was exceedingly popular with British au-diences in the 1980s, because the British TV spectator then possessed lit-tle knowledge of the reality of American life. Just as the Hollywood mov-ies of the 1930s-1950s had successfully accompanied the spectators of Britain’s cinemas through the Great Depression and the World War II, Beijingren would nourish the secret yearnings of the long materially-de-prived Chinese television viewer. Despite the ruin that his family and dreams of being a symphony cellist had become, the protagonist Wang Qiming’s two-storey spacious modern home in the New York suburbs represented an attractive and powerful vision for the Chinese urban dweller inhabiting a small and frugal apartment. American manners and customs were also explained and introduced to the then naive Chinese viewer. For instance, when Wang Qiming asked his white American com-petitor in the clothing business why his friend the buyer had not offered help when he was facing bankruptcy, Wang is given a lesson in the Amer-ican way: “When you are in trouble you are on your own.”

Wang’s personal life also fell foul of American customs so alien to the early 1990s Chinese intellectual that he was. It was the love of his family that led him to give up his/her motherland and sacrifice his personal am-bitions (his desire to become a professional cellist). But Wang Qiming lost his wife to his American business competitor, saw his daughter se-duced by a young white high school student, and later become engaged to be married to the same student’s father. However, while the TV series was necessarily set in New York, Chinese capitalism, the message seemed to be, will be different. Despite this, as China lurched into wild capitalist practices in the late 1990s the effects of Chinese capitalism did not prove

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to be different, least of all for women. In capitalist China woman again became a commodity object as feudal attitudes towards women crept back into the male social imaginary.

Now, a decade and half after Beijingren was screened, there is no long-er any need to show the American capitalist model for it has already long since become the Chinese model. No matter now whether the supermar-ket be French-, American- or Chinese-owned, the model and the prac-tices of consumption are those invented by America. Fifteen hundred years after Hui Shen’s ship sailed to America, Chinese ships queue up in America’s ports to deliver the myriad consumer goods manufactured in China to satisfy the American consumer. Has America now Ameri-canized China or is America simply becoming the China it has Ameri-canized?

ENDNOTES

1. Paris: Mercure de France, 2007, 279.

2. Shawn Wong, Homebase (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 82–83.

3. The French orientalist Joseph de Guignes in his Recherches sur les navigations

des Chinois du côté de l’Amérique, et sur quelques peuples situés à l’extrémité orientale

de l’Asie (Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1761) was the first

to evoke this “discovery,” but later European sinologists were to discredit

and denigrate his findings. However, twentieth-century specialists such as Jo-

seph Needham accredited the theory of visits and migrations to the Americas

by Asians over a sustained period of time lasting two millenia starting in the

the 3rd century before our era. Needham also supports the theory that earlier

migrations from Asia to the Americas had taken place some millenia before;

see Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, IV:3, 548–549 (Cam-

bridge: Cambrige University Press, 1971) and see also the study in Chinese

by Wei Junxian, Zhongguoren faxian Meizho chu kao (Taibei: Shshi chuban

gongsi, 1975). Thus Gavin Menzies’ book 1421: The Year China Discovered the

World (New York: Harper Collins, 2002) is just the latest in a long series of

texts recounting the prowess of Chinese mariners and promoting the claim

that “the Chinese discovered America.”

4. Why do we talk of Chinese emperors and of a Chinese Empire? Quite simply

because the West decided to imagine China that way. Before the modern

West imposed its epistemology on China those inhabiting and ruling the space

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now called the Chinese Empire, called it simply tianxia, meaning literally

“what is under the sky,” in other words ’the world,’ the known world.

5. See Gregory Lee, Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and

Chineseness (Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 2003), passim.

6. Since most contacts with China before the twentieth century occurred via the

Cantonese-speaking ports of the south, Canton, Macau, Hong Kong, many

Western names and terms were transliterated into Cantonese, when these

were subsequently pronounced in Mandarin the sounds were frequently quite

distant from the sounds of the original European language and their Canton-

ese transliteration. For instance, America, A-mei-lei-ga in Cantonese,

becomes Ya-mei-li-jia in Mandarin or “modern standard Chinese.”

7. Cited in Marlon K. Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San

Francisco Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 41.

8. Jean Baudrillard, Amérique (Paris: Grasset, 1986), 76.

9. See Gregory Lee, Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers: Lyricism, Nationa-

lism and Hybridity in China and Its Others (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 1996), chapter 7.

10. There also existed a ”US Postal Agency Shanghai China” which issued stamps

sold in local currency. The stamps were valid for mail dispatched to the United

States.

11. P. 102

12. Confiant, 344.

13. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2003), 20–21.

14. Confiant, 102-103.

15. Confiant, 403.

16. Confiant, 279.

17. Legendre, L’Illustration: Journal Universel, 26 December 1925.

18. Ibid.

19. Wayne Wang directed the, first Chinese American, feature film Chan is missing

in 1981. Chan is the Cantonese reading of the surname 陳, and Chen its

pronunciation in putonghua or modern standard Chinese.

20. A notorious color bar excluded would-be immigrants of color from Australia

for several decades in the twentieth-century, and the Chinese in particular

had known this fate as early as the nineteenth century. See Brian Castro’s

Birds of Passage (North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1989).

21. Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (Lon-

don: Routledge, 1985), 68.

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CHAPTER 10

CIVIL RIgHTS ON THE SCREEN-------------------------------

MICHAEL RENOV

the inspiration for this essay is Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and election and the enthusiastic response those events gener-ated in the United States and around the world. One possible measure of the tidal wave of reaction stirred by Obama’s election is the sheer volume of clips posted on YouTube devoted to the man. Put “Obama” in the You-Tube search box in March 2009 and you’ll find there are 453,000 items. One such piece is a rather brief and not terribly popular video (with a few more than 2,000 hits and only a handful of responses posted). Entitled “Obama and Martin Luther King Speech—I Have a Dream,” this brief clip (one minute twenty-seven seconds in length) is, in many ways, ex-emplary of much of the populist reaction sparked by the ascent to power of the first African American elected to the presidency: hyperbolic, icon-oclastic, and decidedly ahistorical.

What we see is familiar enough: Obama on the campaign trail, deliv-ering a speech, one of thousands delivered over the course of months, to what appears to be an arena of supporters. He gesticulates forcefully, mi-crophone in hand, eventually sharing a hug with wife Michelle and su-perstar pal Oprah Winfrey. The power of the piece, though, lies in the blending of these rather unremarkable visuals with a soundtrack that al-most (but not quite) synchs up with it, composed of carefully edited ex-

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cerpts from what, by the title of the piece (“Obama and Martin Luther King Speech—I Have a Dream”), one might assume to be the seventeen and a half-minute “I Have a Dream” speech given by Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th, 1963 dur-ing the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Delivered to a live audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands, shown live on all three major television networks, “I Have a Dream” is among the most celebrated speeches of the 20th century. Barack Obama was barely two years old when King spoke of a dream he had, “that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” Though the match of sound and image is far from perfect and the histor-ical mapping disparate by decades, the point is made effortlessly. For the present purposes, the clip is a noteworthy instance of semiosis, one that will allow us to ask some questions about the character and mutability of the sign itself.

FROM KINg TO OBAMA

Our discussion of that mutability begins with the clip’s title which prom-ises to link the words of King’s most visionary speech with its eventual culmination through the political ascendancy of a black man to the pres-idency. In fact, the audio is taken from another speech entirely, one given the night before King’s murder on August 4th, 1968 in Memphis, Ten-nessee. Known as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, it was de-livered at Mason Temple, the Church of God in Christ headquarters in Memphis. The chilling words delivered at the close of that speech have of course Biblical echoes (Moses allowed to view Canaan from atop Mount Nebo but not to enter it), but King had come to town to add his ethical weight to a labor struggle, that of Memphis sanitation workers – almost exclusively African Americans – out on strike, in search of a fair contract. He was there to encourage the people of Memphis to rally around their brothers in need, to remain mindful of their strength through solidarity. Yet the concluding moments of the oration are what survive, seeming harbingers of the darkness on the horizon: “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t

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mind … And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!” The dramatic conclusion reaches a messianic peak that the You-Tube author no doubt hoped to channel. Yet the gap between title and content – the concatenation of King speeches in a piece that I’ve charac-terized as hyperbolic, iconoclastic and decidedly ahistorical—I take to be symptomatic of much current political rhetoric and popular culture in ways that I shall outline.

FROM CIVIL RIgHTS TO THE WHITE HOUSE

The ideological bottom line proposed by this YouTube clip or rather “produced” through the magic of cinema (a play of sound/image rela-tions orchestrating multiple temporalities) is a commonly held notion of Barack Obama as the apotheosis of more than fifty years of struggle for racial equality in the United States dating to the 1955 Montgomery (Alabama) Bus Boycott, a year-long effort to end the segregation of public buses in the Alabama state capital that brought to the world stage Rosa Parks and a very young Martin Luther King, Jr. Exemplars of passive resistance—non-violent civil disobedience in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi—Parks and King were but the public faces of an army of dedicated volunteers, shock troops committed to bringing down racial segregation in the American south. Soon they were to be joined by countless others—the college students, beginning in February 1960, who “sat-in” at lunch counters from Greensboro, North Carolina to Nashville, Tennessee and were carted off to jail, the Mississippi Freedom Riders who, in May 1961 left Washington, D.C. on a chartered bus to test the limits of desegrega-tion in the darkest corners of the south, and the marchers in Birming-ham, Alabama on April 2nd, 1963 who, under order from Police Chief Bull Connor, were attacked by police dogs and, subsequently, had their images splashed on the pages of newspapers and magazines around the world.

But these are only the first chapters of a long engagement during which the Civil Rights movement was transformed – radically and in a few short years—in part through the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and King (in 1963, 1965 and 1968 respectively) and the heightened militancy of the late 1960s. What I want to argue is that the

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elision of the darker and more militant phases of struggle effected by the merger of Obama 2008 and King 1963 works, through its shorthand, to draw the newly elected president back toward the consensual middle while sidestepping vast chunks of the historical record. It proposes a direct lineage, an unbroken and idealized succession of inspirational leadership for those engaged in the struggle for racial equality.

Let me be clear. I make no accusations or cast aspersions. For it is the very nature of semiosis to engender slippage, a malleability of meaning, even abject appropriation. The question is the cost to deeper critical and historical understanding. In this essay, I want to return to the historical record by way of the documentary film, to see through recourse to a series of documentary instances how the sounds and images of struggle played out on the screens of America. In that process we will discover the power and flexibility of these signs to inspire and energize contemporaneous audiences as well as those of subsequent times who had no personal memory of the events to which they refer.

SEMIOSIS AND THE DOCUMENTARY

As I’ve stated, this is a study of semiosis. As a documentary scholar, I have on occasion written of the special indexical bond of the documentary film by which I mean the physical linkage between sign and referent, the guar-antee that what one sees on the screen stands as a verifiable trace of what once stood before the lens. The light rays that bounce off the object placed before the lens are registered on photosensitive material leaving an imprint. The photograph, writes Roland Barthes, offers “an immedi-ate presence to the world—a co-presence […] Every photograph is a cer-tificate of presence.”1 The images of an orating Barack Obama hard at work on the campaign trail inspire belief that what we see is precisely what existed before the camera’s lens. In fact, the claim of indexicality insists in all the photographic arts. It is the status to which Andre Bazin refers in his famous essay on “The Ontological Status of the Photograph-ic Image”: “Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or trans-fer. The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it.” 2 The documentary’s power

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as a vehicle of preservation and revivification depends upon its indexical-ity, its physical tie to a preexistent social field.

But it was Peter Wollen, in his ground-breaking 1969 book, Signs and Meanings in the Cinema, who, despite the prevailing preference for the works of Ferdinand de Saussure, suggested that film studies had need of the insights of Charles Sanders Peirce, an American philosopher and historian of science who had posited the three-fold character of the sign. According to Peirce, there were indexical, iconic and symbolic signs. As we have seen, the index draws its force from physical linkage or connec-tion (e.g., the footprint in the sand), while the icon pivots on similarity or resemblance, and the symbol establishes meaning through convention (“the relationship between a symbolic sign and the object it represents is conventional, functioning on the basis of an interpretative habit agreed to by consensus”)3.

But if we turn to the works of Peirce and his followers, we learn that signs are intrinsically dynamic. Indexical signs, for example, almost al-ways contain elements of the other two types of sign (iconic and symbol-ic). “Whenever a sign enters into the semiosis, the dynamic process in which it signifies a given object and produces an interpretant, all three mechanisms – connection/ interaction, similarity and convention—help establish the meaning of the sign. Therefore the designations ‘indexical,’ ‘iconic’ and ‘symbolic’ simply indicate the sign’s dominant, but never sole, mechanism of the standing-for relation.”4 Wollen agreed: “The great merit of Peirce’s analysis of signs is that he did not see the different aspects as mutually exclusive. Unlike Saussure he did not show any par-ticular prejudice in favour of one or the other. Indeed, he wanted a logic and a rhetoric which would be based on all three aspects. It is only by considering the interaction of the three different dimensions of the cin-ema that we can understand its aesthetic effect.”5

We can see this dynamism and fluidity in the YouTube Obama/King duet. The gestural Obama now given the voice of his martyred forebear is an amalgam of index (we intuit the veridical or documentative guar-antee), icon (both the image of the president-to-be and the voice of King are instantly recognizable) and symbol. It is the cinema’s symbol-ic domain that is the most elusive and has inspired entire interpretive communities. For his part, Wollen held that the indexical and iconic as-pects of the cinematic sign were far more powerful while the symbolic was “limited and secondary.”6 While this claim may hold for the cinema

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proper (the feature length fiction), it is not persuasive as we consider the text at hand. The Obama/King sound/image is heavily overdeter-mined, overflowing with meanings tinged by the symbolic. It is thus to the symbolic register that we must turn for explication of its tangled signification.

In a text entitled Mythologies published in France in 1957, Roland Barthes wrote persuasively of “mythic speech,” by which he meant a peculiar or second-order sign system, a kind of meta-linguistic process through which a sign became a signifier for a second level of semiosis. Barthes’ famous example was of a cover image from an issue of Paris-Match in which a young black soldier in a French uniform is shown hap-pily saluting what is presumed to be an out-of-frame French flag. For Barthes the sign of one young man’s salute is at the same time the ground for a second-order semiotic activity, the production of a mythic meaning that implies the continuing potency of the French Empire and its nation-alist appeal even to the colonized, black Africans, Algerians and others, who by the late 1950s had begun to rebel.

The meaning of the sign at the first level (one young man saluting) is enveloped in and overwhelmed by the second-level imputation of a multi-cultural French beneficence: “As a total of linguistic signs, the meaning of the myth has its own value, it belongs to a history, that of the […] Negro: in the meaning, a signification is already built, and could very well be self-sufficient if myth did not take hold of it and did not turn it suddenly into an empty, parasitical form.”7 As Barthes notes, the fun-damental character of the mythical concept is to allow itself to be appro-priated. “This is because myth is speech stolen and restored. Only, speech which is restored is no longer quite that which was stolen: when it was brought back, it was not put exactly in its place. It is this brief act of lar-ceny, this moment taken for a surreptitious faking, which gives mythical speech its benumbed look.”8 In simplest terms, mythic utterance is fro-zen speech, deprived of its power to speak the past: “Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all History. In it, history evaporates.”9

Now I don’t mean to say that our YouTube clip, act of fandom that it is, can be accused of the history-robbing sleight of hand of the infamous Paris-Match cover. But in its easy, 1963-to-2008 elision of a complex and volatile history of struggle for civil rights and racial equality, it renders mute the struggles, the debates and most of all the inelegant radicalism of and reactionary violence against those who served and sacrificed.

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What I propose to do here is to offer, by way of recovery and resurrection, some of the documentary sounds and images of the intervening decades as an antidote to mythic speech, a road back through the history of the movement. In doing so, I hope to rediscover the power of these signs and to note their dynamism, fluidity, and malleability.

THE DOCUMENTARY ANTIDOTE TO “MYTHIC SPEECH”

The first of these reclaimed scenes comes from a remarkable film entitled Sit-In, first broadcast on December 20th, 1960 as the second installment of NBC’s “White Paper” series. Created as a “flagship” documentary se-ries to be anchored by Chet Huntley and as a rival to “CBS Reports” which, under the guidance of Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow, had the year before begun to produce ambitious exposes and public affairs programming,10 “NBC White Paper” sought to burnish the network’s reputation and help dispel the cloud that hovered over the industry in the wake of the quiz show scandals.11 The choice to focus on the sit-in move-ment was a timely one. Having erupted only months earlier (the first sit-in occurred on February 1st, 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina when black college students began spontaneous demonstrations and “sit-downs” in protest of the segregation policies of Woolworth and Kress stores), the movement was beginning to attract the attention of the na-tion. Boycotts of downtown businesses were demonstrating the econom-ic clout of black America. Moreover striking images of black college stu-dents being carted off to local jails en masse while singing protest songs were beginning to affect public opinion and move local lawmakers. Here was Gandhi and King’s non-violent civil disobedience in action and the drama was riveting. Cameras were capturing the stand-downs between black and white, the violent reprisals of white supremacist counter-pro-testors who verbally insulted and physically attacked the black youth as well as the actions of law enforcement who frequently mistreated them. In the hour-long broadcast, directed by Robert D. Young (later the writ-er, director or producer of a succession of socially-conscious features in-cluding Nothing But a Man [1964], Alambrista! [1977] and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez [1982]), direct cinema footage of marches and confronta-tions alternate with interviews with the participants.

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Figure 1: Robert D. Young’s Sit In (NBC White Paper, 1960) brought the Civil Rights struggles of young African American college

students to an American audience.

In her fine account of the program, Sasha Torres notes that the show in-cluded a rather unique device, the flashback. It begins at the height of the conflict—when four thousand blacks marched on City Hall—and returns to the beginnings of the struggle two months earlier. But the most re-markable insight Torres offers has to do with the continuing life and util-ity of the program long after its initial broadcast. She cites Andrew Young’s memoir in which the future mayor of Atlanta, Congressman, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations recalls watching the broadcast with his family and realizing it was time to leave his job with the National Council of Churches in New York and return home to the front lines of battle in the south. Young was to go on to use the film as part of the curriculum of the citizenship school he helped run at the Dorchester Center in Georgia in the early 1960s. The graduates of this school and so many others like it were to become the grass-roots organizers who would fan out across the south to organize in the community, register black voters and push for so-cial change.12 We can say with some certainty that this nationally broad-cast documentary film served a secondary audience: it was for some a training film that demonstrated how to build a non-violent movement dedicated to passive resistance, solidarity and community action.

By mid-decade, a mere five years after the making of Sit-In, the world had radically changed. In the wake of the assassinations of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X; the September 1963 death of four little black girls in a church bombing on a Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama; the dis-covery of the bodies of three young civil rights workers, Goodman, Schw-erner and Chaney, in a ditch outside Philadelphia, Mississippi in August

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1964; Bloody Sunday (March 7th, 1965), the attack by armed police on peaceful demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama; and the eruption of violence in the Watts ghetto outside Los Angeles in August 1965, non-violent protest as the primary weapon for change was being seriously challenged. King had indeed received the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1964 but young leaders such as Stokely Carmichael of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) were beginning to ask what his organization had to offer the black community in the wake of all the violence and frustration: “For too many years,” wrote Carmichael, “black Americans marched and had their heads broken and got shot […] After years of this, we are at almost the same point – because we demon-strated from a position of weakness. We cannot be expected any longer to march and have our heads broken in order to say to whites, come on, you’re nice guys. For you are not nice guys. We have found you out.”13 By 1966, the year of Carmichael’s manifesto entitled “What We Want,” the demand for Black Power had begun to replace “We Shall Overcome.”

This is the context for the second text to be considered, Santiago Al-varez’s 1965 short film, Now!, produced in Cuba as an act of solidarity with American blacks struggling for their rights a mere 90 miles away. A film set to a song – sung by Lena Horne to the tune of an Israeli folk tune,“Hava Nagila,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (the musical comedy duo better known as the creators of On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, and The Bandwagon) – Now! relied upon news footage and photojournalism appropriated from the pages of Life magazine. Al-varez’s montage style, likened by many to that of 20’s Soviet cinema, was necessitated in part by limited resources. “The North Americans,” said Alvarez, “blockade us, so forcing us to improvise. For instance, the great-est inspiration in the photo-collage of American magazines in my films is the American government who have prevented me getting hold of live material.”14 The images Alvarez recycles and renders dynamic are noth-ing more nor less than the public record of these troubled times, a record that the assumption of a King-to-Obama direct lineage must of necessity ignore. In the United States, Now! has remained for more than four de-cades an underground classic. In the 1960s it was available for viewing only through an underground network that linked movement audiences on college campuses and in major cities. It is now distributed by New York’s Third World Newsreel, the latter-day manifestation of the News-reel collective of radical documentary filmmakers founded in 1967.

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In July 1967, riots in Detroit and Newark, cities with large and isolated black populations, left sixty-nine dead. That same year, Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight boxing crown for refusing military service and 100,000 demonstrators marched on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. On April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot dead by sniper fire as he stood on a Memphis motel balcony and the nation erupted in violence.

But the life and writings of H. Rap Brown may be the best barometer of the turbulent times. The one-time chairman of SNCC, by 1968 Brown had renounced his membership and joined the Black Panther Party, even-tually serving as their Minister of Justice. His was but one of many angry black voices whose words polarized America and electrified the black community. In 1969 book entitled Die, Nigger, Die!, Brown famously opined: “The question of violence has been cleared up. This country was born of violence. Violence is as American as cherry pie. Black people have always been violent, but our violence has always been directed toward each other. If nonviolence is to be practiced, then it should be practiced in our community and end there. Violence is a necessary part of revolu-

Figure 2: Now! (1965), coupling scenes of struggle with a rousing Lena Horne vocal, was Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez’s

contribution to the American Civil Rights movement.

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tionary struggle […] We can no longer allow threats of death to immo-bilize us. Death is no stranger to Black folks. We’ve been dying ever since we got here […] The country has delivered an ultimatum to Black peo-ple; America says to Blacks: you either fight to live or you will live to die. I say to America, Fuck It! Freedom or Death. Power to the People.”15

Figure 3: Newsreel’s Black Panther (1969) was a paean to black militancy at the height of its power.

The film Black Panther was shot in 1969 in Oakland, California, headquar-ters of the Black Panther Party. It was the work of San Francisco Newsreel, the Bay Area counterpart to the New York collective that had months ear-lier produced Columbia Revolt (Newsreel #14), an insider’s account of the Columbia University student strike that resulted in the takeover of five university buildings and the eventual arrest of scores of students. Columbia Revolt included, among other things, footage of a student protestor wear-ing sunglasses and smoking a cigar, his feet propped up on Columbia Pres-ident Grayson L. Kirk’s desk in Low Library. It also included footage of black students occupying Hamilton Hall asking white students to leave. Militancy, separatism, black nationalism—such was the order of the day. As early as 1966, the Black Panther Party, soon to suffer the death or imprisonment of many of its leaders, announced a ten-point plan which

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it circulated within the black community. A secondary audience was the white power elite, target of the rhetorical attacks, characterized by Black Panther Party Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver as “the bald-headed businessmen from the Chamber of Commerce.” Nonviolence, passive resistance, King’s “table of brotherhood” were now despised by this most militant faction of the movement. The final demand of the ten-point plan, the Party’s major political objective, was for a United Na-tions-supervised plebiscite to be held “throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national des-tiny.”16 This was nothing less than a call for black national sovereignty and separation from the United States of America, the country that would, four decades later, be led by a black man.

BLACK, PROUD AND gAY

The final proof of the malleability perhaps even fungibility of the audio-visual sign across the rich history of the civil rights movement as repre-sented on the screen comes from Marlon Riggs’ groundbreaking Tongues Untied (1989). This autobiographical work of much power helped launch what Bill Nichols has called the performative mode of documentary. Of-ten fragmentary, densely textured and personal, such works perform a self, a body, construct a subjectivity within a context that is often histor-ically precise and politically engaged.17

In Tongues Untied, Riggs sets out to extend the arena of civil rights and of black activism to a rather different community, that of the black, gay male. The claim is that the solidarity King and others long championed for the movement must be extended to those whose sexual identities and choic-es have resulted in their exclusion from the black mainstream and its insti-tutions—the church, the press, the political and cultural elite. Tongues sought to rally, in Riggs’ words, “a nationwide community of voices—some quietly poetic, some undeniably raw and angry—that together challenge our soci-ety’s most deeply entrenched myths about what it means to be black, to be gay, to be a man, and above all, to be human.”18 Produced near the height of the AIDS epidemic, a moment when the slogan “Silence = death” be-came a rallying cry for public health advocates and gay activists alike, the film (with images of black men kissing) enraged political conservatives who

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called it obscene and attacked the National Endowment of the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for their fiscal sponsorship.

But Tongues’s attack was aimed not only at the right. Riggs accused a homophobic black America of silent collusion with its historic foes. “The legacy of Harriet Tubman,” wrote Riggs, “Sojourner Truth, James Bald-win, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr., and the many thousands more who lived and died to free us all from prescribed social roles defined by a dominant majority, that legacy has come to this: black straight Amer-icans […] passively, silently, acquiescing as political bedmates to the likes of the Reverend Wildmon, James Kilpatrick, and Jesse Helms.”19 At Tongues Untied’s close, an aggressive graphic announced “BLACK MEN LOVING BLACK MEN IS THE REVOLUTIONARY ACT.” The film sought to extend the reach of the historic civil rights movement to include those who had been excluded, silenced, and erased within the black community. Using a lengthy lap dissolve that binds together past and present, Riggs linked the marchers for freedom at Selma (King, Ralph Abernathy, James Lawson) with bare-chested black men marching down a Manhattan street in a 1980s gay pride parade. That intercutting and its claim for a fundamental equiv-alency across the two scenes has raised many an eyebrows over the years.

Like the Obama/King YouTube piece with which we began, it can be accused of hyperbole and iconoclasm but not, I would argue, ahistori-cism. Instead Riggs offers something very like Eisenstein’s notion of in-tellectual montage in which apparently disparate elements are compared and equilibrated in a forceful rhetorical gesture.

I have undertaken here a study of semiosis, of a chain of significations of a particular sort, those surrounding the movement for racial and civil rights in America that has, by some accounts, culminated in the election of Barack Obama. I have suggested that a teleology of this kind, played out in popular culture, is false because fundamentally ahistorical and in a way that stunts and diminishes our understanding. For if the King-to-Obama connection is a necessary one it is also profoundly inadequate owing to its blindness to that complex weave of social forces and actors that, in all its contradictions, constituted that movement. I have taken recourse to the public record, to the witnessing capacity of a series of doc-umentary texts that remind us that the struggles of the past half-century have almost always been waged with cameras present, often as a tool and a weapon. What was and continues to be a social movement for change is also the basis for a semiotic activity without end.

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ENDNOTES

1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard

Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 84, 87.

2. Andre Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What Is Cinema?,

trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14.

3. Jorgen Dines Johansen and Svend Erik Larsen, Signs in Use: An Introduction to Se-

miotics, trans. Dinda L. Gorlee and John Irons (London: Routledge, 2002), 46.

4. Ibid., 51.

5. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press, 1969), 141.

6. Ibid., 140.

7. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and

Wang, 1972), 117.

8. Ibid., 125.

9. Ibid., 151.

10. The best known of these long-form documentaries may be Harvest of Shame,

an interrogation into the plight of migrant farmworkers first broadcast on

26th November 1960.

11. Sasha Torres, Black, White and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princ-

eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 36–37. Torres references Michael

Curtin’s Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics

(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).

12. Ibid., 41-44.

13. Stokely Carmichael, “What We Want,” in Judith Clavir, Albert and Stewart

Edward Albert, eds., The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (New

York: Praeger, 1984), 137.

14. Michael Chanan, The Cuban Image (London: BFI Publishing, 1985), 184.

15. H. Rap Brown, “Die, Nigger, Die!,” in The Sixties Papers, 157, 158.

16. The Black Panther Party, “Platform and Program,” in The Sixties Papers, 163.

17. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,

1994), 92–106. See also my account of documentary subjectivity in The Subject

of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

18. Marlon Riggs, “Tongues Re-Tied,” in Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg,

eds., Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1996), 185.

19. Ibid., 187.

Part 4

america goes Digital

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CHAPTER 11

gOODBYE RABBIT EARS – VISUALIZINg AND MAPPINg

THE US DIgITAL TV TRANSITION-------------------------------

LISA PARKS

the shift to digital television in the U.S. was scheduled to occur on February 17th, 2009. The federal government had been preparing for the transition since the 1990s, mandating that new TV sets be manufactured with digital tuners, supporting broadcast stations as they phase out ana-log and phase in digital systems, and informing consumers about the im-minent changes. This historic transition, compared to the inauguration of color TV, and referred to as the Digital TV or DTV transition, had been widely publicized. Though regulators, broadcasters and manufac-turers had already made many of the key decisions about the future of television, technological negotiations remained for many consumer/citi-zens. In December 2008 there were an estimated 19 million U.S. house-holds still using analog television sets. In technology studies we often hear of “early adopters” and we might call this group the “diehard users.” Owners of analog sets had to decide how and whether they want to con-tinue to receive a television signal and could either purchase a digital con-verter box or a television set with a digital tuner, or subscribe to cable or satellite television. The federal government subsidized the transition and the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) administered a $1.5 billion coupon program to support those who wanted to retrofit their analog receivers with converter boxes.

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In January 2009 the U.S. Congress decided to extend the deadline to the digital TV transition until June 12th, 2009 as a Nielsen corporation sur-vey indicated 6.5 million U.S. homes were still not prepared for the tran-sition.1 Additional funding came from the Obama administration’s fed-eral stimulus package in the amount of $650 million to support the cou-pon converter and public outreach programs. As Senator Rockefeller who introduced the delay bill observed, “The transition is going to hit our most vulnerable citizens—the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and those with language barriers—the hardest.”2

Since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 mandated the digital TV transition, several players with varied interests have maneuvered to ben-efit from the shift. Electronics manufacturers stand to increase profits from the sale of digital TV receivers and converter boxes. Cable and satel-lite providers hoped to attract new subscribers and have become increas-ingly competitive. Consumers have upgraded their systems and have been promised that DTV will bring a “clearer and better” picture as well as new channels and services. Federal agencies hoped to effectively facilitate this nation-wide infrastructural shift and take credit for a smooth transition. Broadcasters, however, have had the most to lose since any kind of signal interruption—whether resulting from confusion on the user end or the limited range of the digital signal —could lead to a reduction in viewership and therefore a decrease in advertising revenues.

Media and communication studies scholars have been tracking the digital TV transition for over a decade, critically examining federal poli-cies, technological changes and entertainment industry practices. Exist-ing research tends to focus on two areas. First, several have used diffusion theory to consider issues of technological adoption focusing on the will-ingness of consumers to adapt to DTV.3 Second, others have examined how the transition has impacted U.S. consumer electronics and its fledg-ling position in that global industry.4 Few, if any, have engaged with the discourses of public outreach initiatives and their address to specific com-munities. In an effort to supplement this work, then, I explore how tech-nical information about DTV was communicated to the public in the months leading up to the transition. Examining a variety of materials, from news reports to maps, from public service announcements to ama-teur videos that document the end of analog service, I consider how con-sumer-citizens have negotiated the digital TV transition. In the process, I highlight three issues: 1) the way fixed income and minority communi-

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ties have been singled out in relation to television; 2) the uneven geog-raphies of the transition; and 3) the way viewers and digital corporations have responded to the transition in its aftermath. What I hope to empha-size throughout is that multiple U.S. “televisions” exist, which is mani-fest in the variety of signal distribution systems (OTA, cable, satellite, web, mobile phone) that persist, the different social communities that engage with television technologies, and the differential geographies of its transmission.

“YOUR TV NEEDS TO BE READY SO YOU CAN KEEP WATCHINg”

Despite TV scholars’ recent focus on cable, satellite, interactive and web-based TV, it is important to recognize that a significant chunk of the U.S. TV audience—roughly 15%—has continued to receive “free” over the air signals for decades. What if the moment of the digital transition led to scholarly investigations of the analog diehards rather than the techno-philes that raced to join the alleged digital TV “revolution”? Given the fixation on novelty in our techno-culture and often in our field, we have much to learn from consumers who, whether by default or by choice, continue to use machines simply because they still work. It’s too easy to equate the use of old machines with poverty or reticence.5

Many assume that analog TV viewers are elderly folks who grew up with rabbit ears, and indeed some of them are. Yet a glance at the FCC dig-ital transition website reminds us just how diverse the U.S. analog TV au-dience is. Information about the transition is provided in the following languages: Amharic, Arabic, Bosnian, Cambodian, Chinese, Creole, French, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Laotian, Navajo, Polish, Por-tuguese, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Yupik. That this array of languages appears suggests that non-English speaking ethnic com-munities were particularly impacted by the transition. Indeed, some such communities have historically received local over the air programming in their own languages. One public service announcement about the digital TV transition features a Somali American woman conveying information about the transition to her community in the Twin Cities. Another fea-tures two white men demonstrating how to hook up a converter box yet the voiceover dub is in Hmong and it has English sub-titles as well. Yet an-

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other made by students participating in the American Indian Summer In-stitute shows the father of the home jerryrigging rabbit ears with foil to in an effort to get reception.

In 2007 Nielsen Corporation released results of a study that found that low income, elderly and Hispanic and Black viewers were the least prepared for the transition. The FCC (Federal Communications Com-mission) and NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) used the sur-vey as a basis for their many public outreach programs, targeting elderly, minority and low-income communities, many of whom live on fixed in-comes and cannot afford to purchase new television sets, or subscribe to cable or satellite television. The Nielsen survey has drawn attention to populations that are for the most part ignored by the commercial televi-sion industry and has been used, in effect, to foster a “no viewer left be-hind” policy. For decades, the interests of the elderly, the poor and a mul-titude of ethnic minorities have been strikingly incongruent with those of the commercial television industry. There are few, if any, primetime network TV series or major national cable channels addressed exclusive-ly to elderly, low-income and/or ethnic minorities, except for Spanish-Language channels such as Telemundo, Univision and Galavision, and the African American cable channel, BET. With the shift from analog to digital, however, there emerged a change of tune. Suddenly broadcasters began to care about these constituencies and this was registered not in a shift in programming content, but in the major public outreach cam-paigns conducted by organizations such as the National Association of Broadcasters, which has desperately tried to maintain current viewership and not let anyone slip through the ratings cracks.

Indeed, national and local organizations have gone to great lengths to communicate with viewers about the transition. As suggested already there has been an armada of public service announcements heralding the changeover. They range from the relatively high budget flashy videos of trade groups to the more homegrown ones of local community organiza-tions. One PSA sponsored by the National Cable and Telecommunica-tions Association that frequently airs on CNN features a sixty-some-thing man strolling through a barren landscape, and, as the sun sets be-hind him, he announces the end of analog and birth of digital TV. An-other stars former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin with a direct address to TV viewers in which he proclaims, “Your TV needs to be ready so you can keep watching.” Yet another presents a popcorn-munching family hud-

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dled around a suspense show that disappointingly turns into static. One, sponsored by the American Disabled Peoples Association, structured as a music video sung to the ABBA song “S.O.S.,” features several “doctors” performing surgery on their TV receivers.6 Finally, a parody from late night TV reveals a sweet elderly woman trying to set up her converter box. After wrestling with tangled cables she asks, “Will all of this make Jack Benny come back?” She then snips a cable with her scissors and sticks her remote control in the microwave in a desperate effort to cap-ture the digital signal.7

While this parody no doubt stirs a chuckle, in much press coverage of the digital TV transition senior white women have been positioned as the archetypal “neighbors who need our assistance.” The Oregonian featured a photo of 87 year-old Bernice McNeel with the caption “no signal” and re-ported after installing two converter boxes she is not receiving all of the channels she used to. The article goes on to explain that reception prob-lems are “especially common in Portland where hilly terrain complicates reception and where an unusually high proportion of people rely on over-the-air broadcasts to watch programs.”8 A New York Times article shows a photo of 77 year-old Vesta Clemmons who lives alone in Houston as she watches a meals-on-wheels volunteer install her converter so that she won’t have to miss her favorite news show “World News with Charles Gibson.”9 Some senior men apparently had challenges with the transition as well. For instance, a 70 year -old Joplin, Missouri man was arrested and charged with unlawful discharge of a firearm when he shot his television set after trying unsuccessfully to set up his converter box.10

While some of the PSAs offered step-by-step instructions about how to hook up a converter box, others emphasized the superior quality of digital TV as a rational for system upgrades. This broad collection of PSAs, of which I’ve mentioned a tiny sliver, is important in that it regis-ters the various ways in which the public has been encouraged to under-stand and negotiate the transition from analog to digital TV. Most of the PSAs emphasize the importance of keeping the television set operating and this serves divergent agendas. Broadcasters (both stations and trade organizations) have been blanketing the airwaves with PSAs not only be-cause they are concerned about their public service mandate, but also be-cause they do not want to lose viewers in the transition since their adver-tising fees are contingent upon ratings. And civil rights groups have in-sisted access to television is important not just as means of entertain-

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ment, but because it is the source of vital information such as weather reports (ie tornado warnings and fire evacuations), school closings and news needed by all citizens.11 Some PSAs positioned television as a public utility, emphasizing the need to upgrade so that citizens can continue watching programming that is both personally meaningful to them and that keeps them informed about important daily developments such as news and weather.

A number of public education and outreach projects have been sup-ported by civil rights and eldercare organizations. The Washington, D.C.-based Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund has or-ganized Digital TV Assistance Centers in major cities across the U.S. and provides educational materials for translation in different languages and trains volunteers. The organization has partnered with local groups to help communities from Chinese Americans in San Francisco to African Americans in Atlanta.12 As one of the San Francisco-based volunteers points out, for many people technology is very complicated and becomes even more complicated when encountered in a foreign language. For consumers who don’t speak English, she explains, it can be very difficult to know which converter box to buy at the store much less how to install it at home since instructions are typically in English.13

Since the DTV transition impacted a high proportion of elderly citi-zens living on fixed incomes, local senior citizen centers and national or-ganizations such AARP, Elders in Action and Meals on Wheels devel-oped education and assistance programs in an effort to help. Senior citi-zen centers hosted public lectures about the changeover (sometimes by FCC commissioners themselves) and distributed FCC information pack-ets. AARP provided a DTV information hotline in English and Spanish and published a series of articles about it in their national website and magazine.14 Meals on Wheels programs from Minneapolis to Houston coordinated and performed converter box installations for seniors who were already having hot meals delivered.15

Local communities also banded together to figure out ways of ad-dressing the shortage of federal coupons for converter boxes. By Decem-ber 2008 the program had run out of funding and there were an estimat-ed 2.6 million people on the waiting list for coupons. While 44 million coupons were distributed, only 18 million had been redeemed.16 Informal economies emerged as a result. The $40 coupons expire after 90 days of receipt, but they are transferable. Thus local churches and community or-

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ganizations began to collect and redistribute un-used coupons as a way of helping those on the waitlist or others who need them.17 While major chain stores charged up to $100 for new converter boxes, some local elec-tronics stores charged only $40, which is the value of a coupon. At its 3,400 stores retail giant Wal-Mart sold converter boxes for $9.87 with a digital coupon (for a total of $49.87).18 Others who acquired coupons but did not plan to use them, attempted to scalp them on craigslist for $20 or best offer. Still others set out to impede the purchase of converter box-es altogether by posting a Youtube video claiming the Wal-Mart Mag-navox converter box was equipped with a tiny camera and microphone and that the DTV transition was at the heart of a conspiracy to extend surveillance into the American home.19

Ironically, there has almost been more discussion and recognition of the interests of the poor, elderly, disabled and ethnic communities in re-lation to digital television than in relation to any other federal programs for education, health care or housing. While this concern for low-in-come, elderly and minority communities may seem on the surface to be a good thing, it also exemplifies a paternalistic posturing toward these communities that figures them as uniquely dependent upon television above all else. What this discourse conceals is how deeply dependent the U.S. commercial is upon a viewer body count. As experts have explained, a substantial loss in numbers of viewers threatens to compromise the busi-ness model of U.S. broadcasting. Since the Nielsen rating samples are randomly drawn, each and every viewer in each and every household counts.

Moreover, the cost of television upgrades came at a moment of eco-nomic crisis for many in the U.S. Though the federal government has in-cluded provisions for the DTV transition in the federal stimulus package, an economic crisis makes conditions worse for those who are already struggling. The unemployment rate has hit 10% in several states and an increasing number of families are faced with the loss of their jobs and homes and are trying to keep food on the table. In these conditions, the prospect of purchasing a new digital television set, converter box or an-tenna, or subscribing to cable or satellite television is a luxury that many cannot afford. As one writer suggests, anyone on fixed incomes should immediately give up their cable or satellite subscriptions and make the necessary investment to access free digital TV. By his calculations, doing so could save the consumer $13,000 over 20 years.20 As the Leadership

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Conf on Civil rights indicates, “a successful transition from analog to digital television is vital to ensuring that those who may be on the remote edges of the economy and society, and already on the wrong side of the Digital Divide, do not suddenly also find themselves on the wrong side of a Digital Television Divide.”21

OUT OF RANgE

Cartography is yet another way that the digital transition has been visu-alized and communicated. This image is a detail view of a national map of the anticipated impact on the reception of the ABC network’s signal. The orange dots indicate areas across the states of Iowa, Missouri and Kansas that will undergo signal loss with the conversion to DTV. The FCC has made these and other maps available visualizing the effects of the transition from both national and local perspectives.22 By examining such maps it is possible to observe some of the unevenness and false promises of the transition. Different areas across the U.S. have been af-fected in different ways. Rather than gain a sharper crisper image, many viewers have lost “free” television signals altogether. In 2009 the FCC predicted that 196 or 11% of the nation’s 1,749 full power stations would have a signal that reaches at least 20% fewer viewers than their current analog signals. Thus just as the transition impacts social communities in a different ways, so does it effect locations in different ways.

Historically, U.S. broadcast coverage has taken on the form of a patch-work of systems rather than existing as a ubiquitous transmission field. These coverage maps are useful because they make this technical reality intelligible. In the national network maps of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC the orange areas indicate signal loss, the green patches indicate signal gain. Despite the promises of glossy trade PSAs, then, these maps expose the reality that the conversion will not occur equally for all. Viewers on the edge of a station’s coverage area most likely lost television service. Some not only required a converter box, but a roof top antenna or booster as well. Digital signals are more finicky than analog broadcasts and topogra-phy can effect reception. It is possible for one home in a neighborhood to get great reception, while another up the block could have its clear picture obscured by a tall tree or far-off hill. This is a significant issue that was not adequately addressed in national public information campaigns.

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These maps also contain information that has been used by antenna manufacturers and cable and satellite operators to target “out of range” citizen-consumers who are unable to receive free digital TV channels and consequently may want other services, whether a cable or satellite sub-scription or high-powered multidirectional antenna. In this way, the maps intimate the location-based or geo-economic strategies of the broadcast industry. This map shows areas with a high proportion of broadcast households in need of targeting for DTV outreach. Read an-other way, it pinpoints areas where there are a high proportion of low-income, ethnic minority and elderly residential districts in the U.S. and serves as a visualization of locations (and hence communities) targeted by the NAB and others in their efforts to keep all viewers watching. An-other map shows areas that have already undergone the transition, areas and communities on the other side of the DTV divide.

Such maps enable the NAB to conduct what it calls “grass roots mar-keting” related to the DTV transition. For instance, the NAB sponsored project called the DTV Road Show is a traveling exhibit making four ma-jor routes across the U.S..23 Since November 2007 two “DTV Trekkers”—moving trucks designed to resemble giant TV sets—have crisscrossed the country and targeted areas with a high proportion of broadcast-only households.24 They ventured into 200 markets and attended 600 events nationwide including state fairs, festivals, and sporting competitions. Ac-cording to the website, “The Roadshow schedule prioritizes areas with high over-the-air (OTA) density, attending events that help us reach those most affected by the switch, including minority/non-English speak-ing populations, older Americans, residents of rural areas, and economi-cally disadvantaged populations.”25 Thus while maps may make broad-casting’s unique coverage patterns and signal histories intelligible, they are also being used to facilitate direct marketing campaigns as well.

Since newly “out of range” viewers will need a new antenna to receive a signal, and since others are bound to experience reception problems, the Consumer Electronics Association has partnered with the NAB to of-fer a service that will assist viewers by recommending antennas and thereby capitalize upon the transition. Recommended by the FCC, An-tenna Web, is a website sponsored by the CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) and NAB, that invites the user to enter his/her address and receive recommendations about which kind of antenna will provide the best reception of signals available in that location. After the user enters a

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U.S. address the interface offers a list of stations available in that market as well as a list of antenna that will work best to receive the different sig-nals. The website also shows a map of the location as well as optimum angles for antenna installation. Tellingly, the website not only collects consumer information, but shows the user the kind of pinpointed resi-dence-specific information that the NAB and CEA already have! Indeed, the practices of the NAB and CEA are consistent with the kind of “inter-active” media regime that uses freedom of choice as a mechanism for ex-tensive consumer monitoring and profiling, a practice Mark Andrejevic refers to as the “digital enclosure.”26 Regardless of how such interfaces and maps are used by the industry, they serve as helpful visualizations for TV scholars because they can enable us to better comprehend and convey television’s spatial and territorializing properties. Further, each PSA, website or map is an attempt to translate largely imperceptible technical processes (which we are socialized to remain naive about) into intelligi-ble forms that can be interpreted and discussed.

FROM SNOW TO WHITE SPACE

When the scheduled DTV transition date, February 17th, 2009, rolled around several Americans were prepared, perched at their analog sets with video cameras pointing at their TV receivers to record the last mo-ments of the analog signal of their local station as it disappeared forever. By March 4th, 2009 there were sixty such videos posted on Youtube. These “end of analog kinescopes,” as we might call them, not only docu-ment the death of various analog TV signals, but they provide an inter-esting glimpse into the range of ways stations and viewers have also com-municated about and understood the transition. One viewer in Iowa set up six television sets and let them run simultaneously so that he could record which ones made the transition and which did not. Two of the monitors lost their signals indicating they moved to digital and others kept running in analog. While some stations across the country simply went off air (such as WEDU in Tampa Bay) and abruptly let the image turn to snow, other stations made a local news event out of the switch off and integrated it into the last analog evening new report. WGEM in Quincy, Illinois, for instance, had a reporter flip the off switch live as the station went “over to digital.” WDEF in Chattanooga provided a short

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station history before signing off. WMTV-15 in Madison, Wisconsin played the national anthem while a flag wave at the state capitol building and signed off with a familiar test pattern. And WSRE-23 in Pensecola, Florida, which typically ended its broadcast day with a photo of the sun-set, had an announcer proclaim, “It’s the end of an era. From this point forward the sun will never set on our signal” and ended not only the broadcast day, but the analog era as the monitor turned to snow.

Just as analog television’s inauguration was celebrated as momentous when it occurred decades ago in the 1930s and 40s so too is its termination. These videos and events are important televisual timepieces. It’s an ironic coincidence that the videos were recorded similarly to that of early kine-scopes in that they serve records of what appeared on the monitor during the signal’s transmission and thus document both the signal’s reception and its disappearance. These viewer-produced videos capture the termina-tion of a system of broadcasting that operated for more than fifty years and many of them end with snow. In this sense, TV snow is an apt icon for this historic moment. Even in its obscurity and abstraction, the image of snow manages to bring a set of material conditions to the surface and evokes a consideration of certain technical, historical and economic issues.

First, and most literally, snow communicates the technical reality of a signal interruption or that a station has stopped broadcasting. Since many stations ended their broadcast day by placing a test pattern, color bars, or station identification in the frame until broadcast resumed in the morning, snow either represented a broadcasting break or system error. The second meaning is more temporal. Since snow will no longer appear on TV after the digital conversion, it will become the symptom of a bygone era of broad-casting. In this way, snow represents a television system that once was and serves as a kind of master shot of analog television’s past. Finally, snow al-ludes indirectly to the open or unused bandwidth in the electromagnetic spectrum, which is sometimes referred to as “white space.” Since numer-ous parties are interested in the future of this “white space,” snow makes intelligible a part of the spectrum that is of great economic value and im-minent regulatory concern.

In recent years companies such as Google, Dell, Earthlink and Intel among others have banded together to pressure the FCC to allow them to utilize this so-called “TV white space” for high-speed Internet connec-tions.27 Two organizations, the White Space Coalition28 and Wireless Innovation Alliance, formed to pressure the FCC to reallocate the part

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of the spectrum formerly allocated for analog broadcasting (TV channels 2-51 - 54-698 MHz) for use by unlicensed (TVBDs and WiFi - wireless) devices. In 2007 Google launched a specific advocacy project called “Free the Airwaves.com.” The goal of the initiative is to make this part of the spectrum available for free to unlicensed users. As Google boasts on its public policy blog “Today: TV Static, Tomorrow: Broadband.”29 Broad-casters have opposed this move because they claim such use would result in interference to licensed broadcast stations still using part of this band-width. Wireless corporations such as Verizon and AT&T have already paid billions of dollars for access to this part of the spectrum and have been waiting to introduce new products that rely upon it.30 On Novem-ber 4th, 2008, the FCC surprisingly voted 5-0 to approve the unlicensed use of white space, thereby silencing opposition from broadcasters.

While the re-allocation of this bandwidth is a complex story, suffice it to say that the interests of low-income, elderly and ethnic minority com-munities that were at the core of public discussions of analog television drop off the radar completely in those of the White Space. These “free airwaves,” as they are referred to again and again, seem to be envisioned as a mobile multimedia playground, ostensibly accessible to anyone, but ultimately restricted to those who can afford to purchase high-end mo-bile devices and have the knowledge to use them. Thus while most have hailed the FCC’s decision as a major victory, I am a bit more skeptical and see this decision as imbricated within the ways the politics of taste, class, race and gender are interwoven with technological innovation and change. Further, Google and other digital companies often use such ini-tiatives in the public sphere as a way of camouflaging their profit-motives and market domination, acting instead as if they are merely agents of digital humanitarianism and public service. Yet Google’s efforts to “open up” the white space may not be so benevolent and resonate instead with Siva Vaidhyanathan’s provocative contention that we are undergoing the “Googlization of Everything.”

CONCLUSION

We might think of the digital transition as a meta-moment in television’s history in that we are confronted with various manifestations of televi-sion itself. Rarely are citizens-viewers encouraged to think so carefully

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about how they get their signals and how their receiver works—to think so specifically about an object that is at once so familiar and so strange. This can be a useful moment, then, in that there is an increase in the circulation of technical knowledge about television in the public sphere. And the analog diehards, in particular, are being addressed, lest they be “left behind” or remain beyond the “digital enclosure.”31 Still, several questions linger, even as new knowledge about television circulates. Af-ter the transition will citizens know not only what digital TV is, but what the FCC is and who its Chair and Commissioners are? Will they care about where their trashed analog TV sets and antennae end up? Will they insist that community television stations not die along with analog TV? And, again, what will become of the white space – that part of the spec-trum left open in the wake of analog TV’s termination? Finally, what does this mean for the future of television scholarship? It is my hope that we will continue our research backward and forward at once, and keep the enticing shimmer of the new—whether we call it the digital or some-thing else—in perspective so that we can continue to explore the multi-farious ways in which people in the US and beyond have (re)arranged, tinkered with, hybrized and defined television technologies in the past and will continue to do so in the future whatever its standard.

Author’s note: This essay was written while I was the Beaverbrook Schol-ar-in-Residence at McGill University in Montreal in March 2009. I am grateful for feedback I received while delivering the paper at Concordia University in Montreal, Stockholm University, and the Annenberg School at USC. I would like to thank Meredith Bak for her helpful re-search assistance.

ENDNOTES

1. “6.5 Million U.S. Homes Unready for Digital TV Transition,” Nielsenwire,

22 January 2009, available at http://blog.nielsen.com/ nielsenwire/media_

entertainment/65-million-us-homes-unready-for-digital-tv-transition/, ac-

cessed 18 March 2009.

2. Brian Stelter, “Digital TV Delay Runs into Protest,” 16 January 2009, The

New York Times, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/technology/

17digital.html, accessed 17 March 2009.

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3. Jean K. Chalby and Glen Segell, “The Broadcasting Media in the Age of Risk:

The Advent of Digital Television,” New Media & Society, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1999):

351–368; and Ian Weber and Vanessa Evans, “Constructing the Meaning of

Digital Television in Britain, the United States and Australia,” New Media &

Society, 2002, Vol. 4, No. 4 (2004): 435–456.

4. Mari Castaneda Paredes, “The Complicated Transition to Broadcast Digital

Transition in the United States,” Television and New Media, Vol. 8, No. 2

(2007): 91–106; Mari Castaneda Paredes, “Television Set Production at the

US-Mexico Border: Trade Policy and Advanced Electronics for the Global

Market,” in Justin Lewis and Toby Miller, eds., Critical Cultural Policy Studies:

A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 272-281; Jeffrey A. Hart, Technol-

ogy, Television, and Competition: The Politics of Digital TV, (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 2004), 60–83

5. For a discussion of the complexities surrounding the practices of old and new

media technologies, see Charles Acland, ed., Residual Media (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, eds.,

TV after Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

6. Jenna Wandres, “AAPD Releases DTV Transition Music Video,” 3 December

2008, available at, http://www.civilrights.org/dtv/index.jsp?page=3, accessed

18 March 2009.

7. This aired on Fox’s Talkshow with Spike Ferensten, season 3, episode 3, avail-

able at http://www.hulu.com/watch/36608/talkshow-with-spike-feresten-

cable-psa#s-p1-st-i1, accessed Dec. 3, 2008.

8. Mike Rogoway, “Time Running Short to Make Digital TV Leap,” The Orego-

nian, 1 November 2008, accessed 18 March 2009.

9. Jacques Steinberg, “Digital TV Beckons, but Many Miss the Call,” The New

York Times, 28 January 2009, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/

arts/television/29ears.html, accessed 18 March 2009.

10. John Eggerton, “KARE: Man Shoots TV Over Converter Confusion,” Broad-

casting and Cable, 20 February 2009, http://www.broadcastingcable.com/ar-

ticle/174518-KARE_Man_Shoots_TV_Over_Converter_Confusion.php.

Thanks to Jeff Sconce for sending this story to me.

11. The civil rights organizer toolkit describes access to television communica-

tion as a “necessity […] not just entertainment” since weather reports such

as tornado warnings, school closings and breaking news updates need to be

known by all citizens. See “Digital Television Transition Organizer Tool

Kit,” civilrights.org, available at www.civilrights.org/dtv/toolkit/, accessed

18 March 2009.

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12. See Jenna Wandres, “LCCREF Video Tells the Story of a DTV Assistance

Center at Work,” 5 March 2009, available at www.civilrights.org/dtv/index.

jsp?page=2, accessed 17 March 2009.

13. Another example of digital TV centers translating into different languages comes

from LISTA (Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology) who organized

training classes in Atlanta. See Jose Marquez, “Join LISTA on Digital Justice Day

and Volunteer in ATLANTA,” available at http://network.nshp.org/forum/

topics/join-lista-on-digital-justice, accessed 4 November 2009.

14. “Get Ready for Digital TV,” AARP.org, 8 March 2007, available at http://

www.aarp.org/money/consumer/articles/digital_tv.html

15. “Keeping Seniors Connected,” Meals on Wheels Association of America,

available at http://www.mowaa.org/Page.aspx?pid=338, accessed 17 March 2009.

16. Washington Post, 30 December 2008.

17. A local newspaper/radio station in Chicago collected and redistributed them

to those who needed them most.

18. “DTV Transition: Wal-Mart Selling Digital TV Converter Boxes,” Broad-

bandinfo.com, Feb. 14, 2008, available at http:// www.broadbandinfo.com/

news-archives/2008/dtv-transition-wal-mart-selling-digital-tv-converter-

boxes.html, accessed March 18, 2009.

19. See video entitled “Cameras in Digital Convert Boxes! BEWARE!!!!,” posted

by mechanismstudios, 16 February 2009, available at http://www.youtube.

com/watch?v=TQ4iIM8Eljc, accessed 18 March 2009. Also see “Camera and

mic found in digital convertor box paid for by Feds,” Prison Planet Forum

blog, 17 February 2009, available at http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.

php?topic=87074, accessed 18 March 2009.

20. Jason Weitzel, “Pulling Free TV Signals out of Berks County’s Thin Air,”

Reading Eagle.com (Penn.), February 2, 2009, available at http://readingea-

gle.com/articleprint.aspx?od=123746, accessed March 18, 2009.

21. “Transition in Trouble: Action Needed to Ensure a Successful Digital Televi-

sion Transition,” available at http://www.civilrights. org/publications/re-

ports/dtv/introduction.html, accessed 17 March 2009.

22. “Updated Maps of All Full-Service Digital TV Stations Authorized by the

FCC,” available at http://www.fcc.gov /dtv/ markets/, accessed 17 March 2009.

23. Hired Atlanta based company Mobile Marketing Enterprises to organize it.

24. “DTV Roadshow,” DTVAnswers (NAB), available at http://www.dtvan-

swers.com/roadshow/, accessed 17 March 2009.

25. “Summary of the DTV Roadshow,” DTVAnswers (NAB), http://www.dtvan-

swers.com/roadshow/, accessed 17 March 2009

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26. Mark Andrejevic, I Spy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era, (Law-

rence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 2–3.

27. “The White Open Spaces,” Editorial, Washington Post, 16 August 2007 avail-

able at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/

15/AR2007081502128.html, accessed 17 March 2009.

28. The member companies include Microsoft, Google, Dell, HP, Intel, Philips,

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31. Andrejevic, 2–3.

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